Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

Whereupon his questioners were distracted by the appearance here and there of other robed survivors. The two anthropologists remembered they had neglected to ask this humble savant why the hundreds of other survivors had not been denuded in this latest test. They saw the boy baseball player, the stubbly derelict, and, from the building that had been the bomb’s central target, two male elevator operators and a female draftsman raise a hand in the same manner as the sexton simultaneously although they were not all in sight of each other. The sexton turned away, and the anthropologists were ushered out before they knew it.

Jim Ash, who, humble journeyman, found himself drawn inexorably toward hard science, noted that the two investigators did not report back to their watchdog subcommittee. They volunteered for the next available test. The debriefing lab teams weren’t talking, and Jim Ash reported that they had now been sequestered. Asked how they had fallen safely from great heights, many survivors smiled with a new form of wordless generosity. An elevator operator said it wasn’t like falling down a shaft; there was no shaft. A pilot, who had been weekending in the penthouse of a targeted structure, said that for her it was like being struck dumb by love and that instead of support being taken away when the building was erased, on the contrary some impediment had been removed, and she knew deep within herself that she and gravity were friends. An anti-abortion group said the women survivors were hysterically possessed. The small but vocal political opposition to the government charged that survivors ate and worked sparingly, seemed at times drugged yet suspiciously alert, and stuck together. Large groups of survivors turned up in parks and open plazas and brought with them a silence natural and fascinating to bystanders — to "non-survivors," as Jim Ash called them. In these hushed gatherings the survivors would nod or shake their heads, smile or open their mouths as if to breathe something more than air. They communicated among one another without words and often without looks. Two sailors reported that in the vicinity of a group of survivors odd shifts of air current and moisture-dryness ratio were felt.

Eventually a survivor was kidnapped. It was the former National Guard major who had been an executive in the seaport outerwear factory. The kidnappers phoned Jim Ash to report that their captive had disappeared on them. Several known survivors phoned Jim Ash to say they were convinced there had been a raid on the rural lab where the bomb formula had been discovered. The ex-major was accused in absentia by the Committee for a Sane Bomb of stealing the formula to sell. The kidnappers reported that the major had had a peculiar incision in his chest before they had worked him over; the committee accused the government of altering the survivors. A hundred survivors selected at random were called in and found to be feeling fine. Ash was known to have visited the missing ex-major’s physician. Ash phoned to give us in strictest confidence a fuller account of what Mara had told him in the valley. Several foreign powers complained that the varying effects of the bomb made its formula difficult to infer. Unaccountably, Washington offered to share the bomb. The sharing would be phased. Demonstrations would be given abroad on targets mutually agreed upon though chosen by the United States. Then the formula would be passed to nations that could show a real need for it. Gradually, postblast findings would be shared. A mass protest of archaeologists in a green field near England’s famed ancient baths was given a surprise bombing, to demonstrate good faith by the targeting of an area where there were only people and no buildings; the archaeologists reported afterward that they, in the American phrase, had a good feeling and in terms of their profession were looking inward as never before.

Unavailable for almost a month, Ash was reported to have said that the increasing sophistication of the bomb’s effects — its growth, if you will— might not be the result of tinkering with the formula. Jim was usually onto something when he was not in touch with us. Now he phoned to report that a top science adviser had told him that in fact, from one test to the next, no changes in the bomb’s formula or in the operational nuts and bolts had been contemplated. "They" were letting the device "have its head." They were going to clear away the Golden Gate Bridge in an upcoming test in order to prepare for the construction of a new bridge which the contractor had promoted by enlisting several survivors as advisers.

A brain-scan technician at the original Stateside postblast debriefing had asked to be included in the upcoming test. His request had been denied, and he was in a dangerous state. On a day when saffron ceilings of pollution over New York, Denver, and Los Angeles mysteriously turned into three great gentle gray clouds suggesting the forms of future animals and then almost simultaneously condensed into a rain so rich that acid lawns turned blue and the very police stripped themselves naked in the avenues giving thanks to that tonic flood of new weather, the technician whose request had been denied expressed his rage by calling a press conference. He would tell all, or at least more than he knew.

It was a violent scene. Jim Ash and others blocked the double doors as long as they could. The technician was letting it all out — anger and information. Survivor brain voltages, if anyone cared to know, had hit levels so far beyond parameter models as to be either freakish and lethal or an adaptive mutation that made this a whole new ball game. Moreover, these unthinkable sharp loads of electrical charge — if it was electricity — were coming from such a small fraction of the brain that large areas "looked" positively dead, and this was presently borne out by the trimensional pictures, though they came out spotty. But one thing was clear: there was endless variation from survivor to survivor as to which brain areas were nonfunctional, yet the actual amount was a pretty consistent fifty percent in most of the subjects, while from other brain sectors came these giant flows of more force than you would think a head could handle.

The technician stopped — his mustache drooped — something in him had stopped, or his powerful rage at being rebuffed in his effort to be a bomb survivor was beginning to translate force into guilt. Newspersons scuffled with federal officers at the door. Facing a dozen questions at once, the technician ignored them and talked fast. These survivors had seemed to know each other. No matter who they were. Yes, and they laughed too damn much, many of them at the X-rays. They said the machine must be one of the early models. Big joke. What happened to the synthetic sieve my surgeon tucked into my liver last Christmas? one asked. A more potent X-ray "eye" was flown in from the Caucasus. One survivor had laughed so hard he clapped a hand over his chest and his eyes stood out; his hand covered an incision. He wasn’t the only one with an incision. Like some others with incisions, he looked at his X-ray and said, "There’s nothing there." Big joke.

Jim Ash, struggling with federal officers who were trying to enter the long room, called out over his shoulder, "Was that man a part-time major in the National Guard?" but the technician, in whom for a moment resentment had seemed to slow down into nostalgia, pressed on: These people! Secretly communicative people! Happy, frighteningly happy! Well, when their follow-up scans came in, the voltages had risen again but now the huge charge had distributed itself, and amazingly the voltages were coming from all quadrants and yet the new trimensionals showed that the dead hunks of brain were now gone, obliterated, what have you, removed—