Ben Bova - Test of Fire

“It slides,” Douglas said.

“Thanks for telling me before I ruptured myself.” The door slid back smoothly. It’s been oiled recently, Alec realized.

They clattered down a long metal stairway into utter darkness, groping along the wall and railing until Douglas said, “Wait a minute… the generator switch should be… here…”

A click, and then from somewhere in the darkness below them a rumble and whine from a diesel generator set. Alec smelled a whiff of machine oil.

Then lights glowed into life.

He could see that the stairs went down another twenty meters and ended in a huge storehouse room. Spread across the floor were heavy, dull gray metal cylinders, each bearing the blood-red three-sided emblem of danger and the printed words RADIOACTIVE MATERIAL. There were dozens of the cylinders, Alec saw, scores of them.

A hundred, maybe more.

Enough to power the processing plants for a century, at least.

As if reading his thoughts, Alec said, “There’s enough fissionable material here to blow up everything between the Great Lakes and Cape Cod.”

Alec turned to his father, standing two steps above him. “We need this… some of it, at least. We need it to live.”

But Douglas shook his head. “No. If I let you take even some of this back to the Moon, we’d be killing them. You can kill people with kindness, you know. The wrong sort of kindness.”

Alec could feel himself going tense, the skin on his face stretching taut. “In another year we won’t have the energy to process the water and medicines we need. You can’t…”

“Don’t tell me what I can’t do!” Douglas’s voice boomed off the cement walls and metal stairs.

“Those people can’t survive up there by themselves no matter how much fissionable fuel they have. They can’t live cooped up in their underground rats’ nest. They’ve got to re-establish contact with Earth. Not just a raid every few years, but real contact—genetically meaningful contact!”

“So you can rule them!” Alec lashed back at his father.

Douglas’s mouth opened, but no words came out. He broke out into a roar of laughter, instead.

They quartered Alec in a room of his own, in what had once been the Air Base’s bachelor officers’ quarters. The two-story brick building was an efficient but drab set of dormitory rooms. They were spacious, compared to what Alec had grown up with. His room was on the second floor, in a corner, so that he had two windows. There was a real bed, a desk, and a chest of drawers. Alec smiled at the furniture. He had nothing to put in the drawers, nothing to hang in the closet.

But there was a shower, and it worked! For a slothful long hour Alec luxuriated in the unbelievable pleasure of having actual water, steaming hot, sluicing over his naked body. Two large pieces of fuzzy cloth hung on a rack next to the shower; Alec used them to rub himself dry.

Someone tapped at his door. Wrapping one of the cloths around his waist, he yelled, “Come in,” as he stepped from the bathroom in time to see Angela open the hall door, carrying an armful of clothes.

“Oh…” They said it together.

She simply stood there gaping at him. Alec clutched at the towel, holding it tightly around his middle, feeling foolish about it but embarrassed to let it slip.

“I was cleaning myself…” he said lamely.

She grinned at him, making his face redden. “So I see.” She wore a pale blue dress that complemented her eyes and golden hair. The skirt was short enough to show that her legs were fine and graceful.

“You look very pretty,” he said.

“So do you,” she replied, with a giggle.

Flustered, he stood tongue-tied.

“I brought some fresh clothes for you from the supply shop,” Angela said. “I hope they fit okay. If they don’t, I can fix them for you.”

“Thanks.”

She dropped the clothes on the bed. Looking around the room she asked, “Is everything okay? Do you need shaving things?”

“No,” he answered. “I won’t need another depilatory treatment for six months or so.”

“Oh. Okay.”

“Is there someplace to eat around here? Have you had dinner?”

“The mess hall will be open in an hour. If you’re really hungry I can fix you something at my place. It’s not far from here.”

“Uh, no, that’s all right. Guess I’d better get dressed.”

“Okay.” She started for the door.

“No, wait.” For Christ’s sake, this is idiotic.

We’ve made love together! “Don’t go… Let’s have dinner together.”

She nodded and smiled at him.

Feeling utterly silly, Alec took the clothes into the bathroom and tried them on. Turtleneck shirt, dark blue and thickly ribbed. Gray slacks that were too large in the waist and so long that he had to turn the cuffs up twice. A pair of solid boots, good size. A belt to pull the pants tight. And they all smelled clean, felt soft.

“How do I look?” he asked as he came out of the bathroom.

She smiled and frowned at the same time. “I wasn’t too good about the sizes, was I?”

“Only the pants. The rest fits fine.”

They had dinner in the noisy, crowded, clattering mess hall, sitting on benches at long wooden tables surrounded by steam and pungent odors and other people who chattered their conversations, oblivious of Alec and Angela. They sat side by side, saying almost nothing to each other. The food was hot and solid, nothing fancy, but more of it than Alec had been able to get since leaving the Moon.

Outside afterward, it was dark and their frosty breaths hung in the air before them. The buildings were all alight. Why not? Alec thought. He’s probably got nuclear generators buried underground somewhere, using the fuel we need.

They walked under the chilled stars to Angela’s home, a separate little house at the head of a curved row of white wooden houses.

“I have some wine,” she said. “The villagers make it.”

Inside, the house was a combination of warmth and utilitarianism. Furniture was sparse. The front room was completely empty except for a single old wooden chair with a high straight back and a rug made from some sort of animal fur, rolled up in a corner. The fireplace looked cold and empty. Angela led Alec back to the kitchen, which had a table and three mismatched chairs, as well as a small refrigerator, stove and sink, all lined against one wall. Through another doorway Alec could see the bedroom. There was nothing in it except a mattress on the floor with a sleeping bag half unrolled atop it.

“You have this place all to yourself?”

“Yes,” she said, reaching down to a cabinet under the sink and pulling out a dusty green bottle. “I just moved in a few weeks ago. Da… uh, Douglas said it was time for me to have a place of my own. He lives in the house down at the other end of the row. Will and most of the other leaders live here… or really, their families do. Most of the time the men are out in the countryside somewhere.”

“Will has a family?”

She set the bottle on the table next to Alec and took two glasses from a cabinet. “He was going to marry a girl from one of the villages west of here. But she was taken by one of the raider gangs. No-one’s been able to find her since.”

Somehow that hit Alec like a physical blow.

Angela brought the glasses to the table. Sitting next to Alec, she said softly. “It happened years ago… he got over it.”

“Did he?”

She shrugged. “He functions. He lives. He even sings, sometimes.”

Alec let his breath out in a pent-up sigh. “It’s a lousy world.”

“It’s the only one we’ve got.”

No, it isn’t, he answered silently.

Eyeing the wine bottle, Angela asked, “Will you pour, or shall I?”