Pat Frank - Mr. Adam

“You keep it quiet,” I said, thinking of the story, although when I look back on it now a news beat seems very small potatoes, and indeed almost irrelevant. “You keep quiet about this, but I’ll want to see you about it later.”

I hung up, and turned to J.C. “I think,” I said, “that the world has had it!”

“Perhaps not the whole world,” said J.C. “Perhaps only the Western Hemisphere.” He handed me the message form. It read:

URGENT PRESS FYI ONLY FYI ONLY USING UTMOST DISCRETION ASCERTAIN WHETHER ANY SUDDEN DROP BIRTHRATE EXPECTED LOCALLY JUNE OR JULY STOP REPLY PERSONALLY URGENTEST POGEY

“We’ll send this immediately,” he said, “to Pat Morin in Paris, and Boots Norgaard in Rome, and Frank O’Brien in Istanbul, and Goldberg in Budapest, and Eddy Gilmore in Moscow. And of course to the London Bureau.”

“They’ll think you’re nuts,” I said.

“They will until they’ve checked up,” said J.C. “Then they’ll be frightened, just as you are, and just as I am. We won’t get answers to these queries until tomorrow, so you go on home to that blonde wife of yours, and get plenty of sleep, because I do not believe you will be sleeping very much for a week or so.”

One of our best spies told me, once, that there were only two kinds of wives—those to whom you told nothing, and those to whom you told everything. I tell Marge everything, but on this night I kept my mouth shut, because I knew if we started talking about it I’d never get any sleep. Besides, I was afraid. I didn’t know how she’d react if I told her it didn’t appear likely that we’d ever have any babies. I felt desolate, and empty inside. I consumed a good deal of rye, straight, before I slept.

In the morning Marge brought coffee to bed, which was unusual, and she said: “Stephen, you’re not sick, are you?”

“No. I’ve got to get up. I’ve got to go to the office early.”

“Stephen, what’s the trouble?”

“Nothing,” I said, and put the covers over my head and crawled into the middle of “Smith Field.” We have the most enormous double bed in New York, built for lazy living. It’s surrounded by a shelf, and gadgets. On one side we have a radio, and a bookcase, and on the other a little refrigerator and bar. Our friends say our bed is decadent, and indecent, but we like it, and call it Smith Field.

“There’s no use hiding,” said Marge. “Come out from under there. You’ve either been gambling, or there’s been trouble at the office, or you’re sick. Something really bad has happened. I know.”

“It’s just that I’m a little hung over,” I lied.

“Is it that hospital business you talked about last week?”

I didn’t reply, but I knew that she knew. “I don’t know why,” Marge said, “but I’ve been worrying about it.”

“Nothing is certain, yet,” I said. When I left the house I kissed her with what I thought was reassurance. But I had never before seen Marge’s face so strained, and her eyes so dull, and lacking of life. On the way uptown it seemed that I stood apart and alone from all the others on the streets and in the subway. The bustle of New York going to work on a weekday morning seemed altogether futile and without meaning.

J.C. had a little stack of teletype messages on his desk, and I knew the verdict before I read them, simply by the set of his shoulders, and by his silence.

The answers were all the same. So far as anyone could determine, no more children would be born after the last week in June. In Paris and London, very secret official investigations had already been started.

“We’ve got answers,” said J.C., “from everywhere except Moscow,” but even as he spoke an office boy brought in another incoming teletype. It was from the Moscow Bureau. It read:

URGENT PRESS ASSOCIATED NEW YORK PROPOGEY SOVIET GOVERNMENT PERTURBEDEST MY INQUIRIES STOP MY EXPULSION THREATENED PROATTEMPTING PENETRATE STATE SECRETS STOP HOWEVER YOUR HUNCH CORRECT GILMORE

“That’s enough for me,” said J.C.

“It seems to me,” I said, “that the whole world knows about this thing, and is trying to keep it a secret.”

“I don’t blame the whole world,” said J.C. “The whole world is like a man who knows he has cancer, but won’t admit it, even to himself. However, it has to break some time, and as long as it has to break, the AP might as well break it.”

“We’ll have to put the Washington Bureau on it, for official statements, and the American Medical Association. But—why?”

“That’s it—why?”

“There must be a scientific reason.”

J.C. put the worn serge of his elbows on his desk and massaged his head behind his ears. “All night,” he said, “I kept thinking of something General Farrell said after he witnessed the first atomic bomb explosion in New Mexico. He said, if I remember the words correctly, that the explosion ‘warned of doomsday and made us feel that we puny things were blasphemous to dare tamper with the forces heretofore reserved to the Almighty.’”

I recalled a kindred phrase, after Hiroshima was atomized, about civilization now having the power to commit suicide at will. I thought about it, and I thought of the Mississippi disaster, and the thing began to come clear to me, and I yelled: “When was it that Mississippi blew up? Wasn’t it in September?”

J.C. straightened. “That’s it, of course!” he said. “The Mississippi explosion was September the twenty-first. Nine months to the day! Nine months to the very day!”

You will remember that on September 21 the great new nuclear fission plants at Bohrville, Mississippi—a city erected in the center of the state and named after one of the famous atomic physicists—disintegrated in an explosion that made Nagasaki and Hiroshima mere cap pistols by comparison.

Not only did Bohrville disintegrate but most of Mississippi went along with it. The blinding glare of the Bohrville disaster was seen as far north as Chicago, and across the Gulf of Mexico. St. Louis felt it as an earthshock, while the heat was dangerous in New Orleans.

What caused the explosion no man knew, for naturally there were no survivors. But it was known in Washington that the Bohrville plants were producing U-235, Plutonium, and even rarer and more violently radioactive substances in quantities that had been impossible in the plants at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and Hanford, Washington.

The effects of the explosion upon the world were profound, and not all of them could be classed as evil. For one thing the United States stopped making atomic bombs, and the other nations showed no desire to begin where we left off. Molotov issued a statement blaming the explosion on the greedy capitalistic system, and assured the Russians that there were no nuclear fission plants within the borders of the Soviet Union. In the Argentine, certain pro-Fascist scientists suddenly ceased their private experiments, and began to take up botany and ichthyology.

The United Nations had no trouble pledging its members to outlaw the atom as a weapon of war, but of course small wars kept going on, around the world.

Besides, nobody really missed Mississippi. The explosion eliminated Bilbo and Rankin, and anyway Mississippi was the most backward of states. People felt that if any one of the forty-eight states had to be sacrificed, it was just as well that it happened to Mississippi.

After the explosion I was assigned to interview the atomic physicists who lived in the New York area as to the probable cause, and the results. I remembered, now, that all the physicists had assured me that the explosion was only dangerous within a radius of a few hundred miles. But always I had had a disquieting feeling that there was something else they wished to say, but were afraid to say. It was as if there were something they were afraid to put into words, even to themselves.