Damon Knight - Orbit 14

Sid is still writing, doesn’t notice when the old man glances in at him. The old man follows the diagram in the front of the booklet, through a door marked A-l, to the end of the room with miscellaneous pipes and tanks, to the far end where there is a small stainless steel door four feet above the floor. Behind the door there is a gauge registering full, a valve, a set of instructions riveted Co a curved shiny surface. Twenty thousand gallons of fuel oil in a stainless steel tank! The pipes and the holding tanks are all designed so that the oil will flow by gravity when the valves are opened. They provided a Diesel-powered generator to be connected to the freezer unit, he realizes, with enough oil in storage to run it for years. No one ever started the generator; no one ever opened the valves. His feet drag when he leaves the room and joins Sid once more in the vault.

Sid is no longer writing. He is leafing through his diaries, first one, then another, not pausing long anywhere.

“What happened, Sid? How did it start?”

Sid shrugs. “I was reading some of the earliest books,” he says. “Didn’t realize at the time how contradictory the statements were. First they said China hit Russia with missiles. Then they said that type A flu virus was pandemic. Then biological warfare. God knows.”

“I was home on vacation,” the old man says. “We started to run. My father was afraid we’d all die of plague. The cities were emptied practically overnight. I remember that. Was it plague?”

Again Sid shrugs. “A combination, I guess.” He snaps the book shut, puts it back in the box with the others, and pushes the box against the wall. “Ready?”

There are many meetings now. No one is to live alone any longer. Each group must have a man with a gun, and they have to fortify their homes, put bars on the windows, locks on the doors. No one is to wander outside alone, or after dark. And the daily expeditions to find the children will continue. Sid doesn’t disclose the old man’s secret. To the old man he says, “I won’t help them find the kids and destroy them. Neither will I help the kids in any way.”

The old man is tormented now, unable to sleep, and all the while it seems that an obsession is growing within him. He knows that his people are threatened, that the children are the enemy, that their hunger will be more powerful than the strategems adopted by the people. And still he is obsessed with the idea that he has to act for them, make them accept his help. This old man and the man who is his son in all but the flesh, they will save humanity. He is hardly aware when Sam Whitten dies. The ground is frozen now; they will bury him in the spring, and until then the cold will preserve the thin old body. The people have become despondent and more fearful. There are outbursts of talk, then a strained silence among them as they listen to hear if the shadows are alive. Dore and Sid have moved into Monica’s palace. She is tearing down the forest in order to create an early American tavern. The old man doesn’t visit her.

Only Boy still ventures out after dark, but his forays are less frequent and most of the time he is close to the old man. Every day they go to the hospital, where they clean out the vault. They assemble the generator according to instructions and turn on the valves and start one Diesel; slowly the vault is chilled below zero. Unquestioningly Boy does what the old man tells him to do. The old man often addresses him as “Son,” and Boy accepts this also.

Somehow, the old man thinks, he must learn about artificial insemination. He must collect sperm from Boy. He must impregnate the wild girl with it. And he must instruct her, or the eunuch boys, in the method so that when the other girls reach childbearing age, they also can be impregnated. And in the privacy of his rooms, the old man laughs. Boy watches him fearfully. Sid and Dore also watch him when they are there, and Dore’s face reveals his worry. They think he is going mad, the old man knows, and he doesn’t know how to demonstrate that he is not.

Now when Boy starts to leave him, the old man says, “Don’t go out. Don’t leave me alone.” And Boy obediently sits down again. The old man is afraid that Boy will go out and won’t come back again, that he will not be allowed to finish what he knows he must do. He feels ashamed, implicitly lying to Boy, but he does it repeatedly in order to keep Boy nearby. He knows that he has to collect the semen very soon, that time may be working against him now.

Every night he prepares tea for himself and Boy; sometimes they have the flat nut cakes, sometimes the freeze-dried food, which is not as nourishing as it once was. This night the old man drugs Boy heavily and while he sleeps the old man kneels over him, weeping silently, and masturbates him and collects the ejaculate in a sterile flask. He is too blinded by tears to be certain he has covered Boy properly when he leaves him. Later he returns and arranges the blankets, and kisses Boy on the forehead.

It is cold, but not cold enough to preserve the semen; he has to take it to the vault that night, divide it among several vials, seal them, label them, freeze them. It is almost dawn when he returns and drops to his bed exhausted. Time and age, he thinks, unable to sleep, aching and afraid of the way his heart is palpitating. Time and age.

Every night he makes his solitary journey to the hospital with another flask, and each day his face is greyer, he is more fatigued. Dore is insistent that the old man move to the palace, or at least let someone come and stay with him in his apartment. The old man refuses irritably, and Dore leaves him alone. But they are talking about him, he knows. It is hard to find time alone now. Someone always seems to be with him, observing him, afraid that if he breaks, they will be without any medical help at all. How very old they all are, he thinks one day, surprised that he has never realized it before. The survivors are all over seventy, all except Boy. It is time for them all to die.

That night when he returns from the hospital, Boy is gone.

For hours the old man sits at his window, staring blindly at the dark city. He is frozen, he cannot weep, cannot think, cannot feel. Soon after dawn he unwraps his shotgun and carefully inspects it, rubs the metal with an oil-soaked rag, and then examines his shells. He loads the gun and puts the rest of his shells into a pouch that he wears like a necklace, and then he goes to the eighth floor where the telescope is. Slowly, painstakingly, he scans what he can see of the city, not looking at the ruined streets and buildings but at the black line where city and sky meet, and finally he finds a place where the air shimmies, and, squinting, he believes he can see smoke. It is very far away, miles up the river, close to the downtown section. He dresses warmly and starts out, not thinking anything at all.

When he nears the downtown area, he knows where he will find them, and he turns toward the bridge that is still standing, with great gaping holes in the roadbed, and supporting posts that are eaten through in places with corrosion, but not enough to collapse the structure. With their fear of enclosed places, the children will huddle under the bridge, and anyone approaching will be visible a long way off. He doesn’t approach yet. He goes inside an office building and climbs up to the third floor where he can look out and see the children. They are here as he expected: four of them, the smaller ones, are huddled close to a small fire; the older ones are not in sight. As he watches, one of the little ones, who are indistinguishable in their blankets, nods again and again and finally lies down on the ground and draws up into a compact ball to sleep. There is no sign of Boy’s body.

The old man waits at the window. He dozes and starts into wakefulness many times, and his legs grow stiff with cold and fatigue. There is a ringing in his head, and when he is awake, he has a sense of euphoria now, of well-being and contentment. Suddenly he wakes thoroughly and knows that he will freeze to death if he doesn’t move. He should have eaten. He should have brought food with him. He tries to stand and reels into the wall and nearly falls down, catching himself clumsily. A fall could be fatal, he knows. A broken leg or hip, and he will die in this office building. He flexes his muscles slowly, and with each movement there is a burning pain that races through his body. Finally he is able to move; he stumbles to the door and down to the street again. He stays in the alleys until he is very close to the bridge. The other three children are back. He counts them. Seven. The old man is almost close enough now to reveal himself, to be able to fire into the group and be certain of killing or injuring most of them with the two shots in his gun. He takes another step, and suddenly he hears a whisper behind him.