John Sayles - The Anarchist's Convention and Other Stories

"So the orders get passed down and they say Nagasaki, on Kyushu island, and-be prepared for anything. Surrender was official already but who expects some Nip has just been Hbombed to listen to the news?"

A hunk of chicken plopped off Treat's fork and he bit down on bare metal. Derry giggled. A bean sprout whimpered as it slid down Brian's throat. Derry's foot brushed his ankle. He could feel her toes grasping to hold his pants-leg.

"It wasn't anything out of the usual," said Treat, "not at first. A big river valley and a port that had been bombed. A lot of the damage to the buildings was from conventional attacks before. Wasn't much left at the bottom of the valley, but as you rose up the sides vegetation went from black to brown to yellow to green. The burns on people were in that pattern too, mostly on one side of the body, darker and deeper the further down into the valley you went. Of course, the worst weren't even there to be seen. Pretty much vaporized, maybe their shadow burnt into the side of a building. Remember this one woman, she had been nursing her baby when the blast came. About halfway up the valley wall she was. One of her breasts was tanned a deep dark brown, the other white from where her baby's head soaked up most of the radiation."

Brian gagged on his milk and got some up his nose. Derry handed him the Bosco. Treat worked on his plate in a counterclockwise direction, tapping it lightly with fork tip to be sure he missed nothing.

"It was the weeks after, when we were administrating the island and classifying the doomed that it got rough. People's hair fell out. Women's — that long, black, beautiful hair pulled out by the handful, you'd see little girls like Derry here, barely high-school age, all bald and scabby-headed. Kids' teeth crumbled like candy. Men grew breasts. People died of nosebleeds that wouldn't stop. People just starting to feel the poisoning would sit in the hospital waiting and see all the stages they were headed for sitting around them, meet relatives who they couldn't recognize but by voice. A lot of them blinded in the first flash got their sight back and wished they hadn't. Quite a few recovered and never let on, preferred to grope and bump and cry in the dark though there was nothing physically wrong with their eyes. Who knows, maybe they didn't see. And then the babies that were born — God. It was like Nature decided to review all the false starts and bad experiments she made on her way to evolving man. Things without arms, things without legs, two-headed things, legs or arms without anything else. One woman delivered up this big ball of teeth fused together, looked like a sea urchin. The ones who got vaporized, they were the lucky ones, them and the blind ones who didn't have to see it."

Treat almost tipped his glass putting it back into its tablewell. He had a clot of rice on his neck. "You want to get the dessert, Derry?"

"Mnph.

"I feh I wuh." Chicken juice dribbled down her chin and she had to snake it with her tongue.

"You go get it and try waiting till you're done chewing before you speak. There's things you can get away with in front of me that you can't do in front of company."

She stuck her little red tongue out in front of both of them and went to the refrigerator.

"It's a chore raising her myself," whispered Treat to Brian. "Trying to keep her safe, teach her the right way. The wife passed on in 'sixty-four, Derry was only two. That's her on the door down there, back when we lived in Houston. I gave Derry a picture to send and have it blown up, so's she'd remember what her mother looked like."

Derry returned with three plastic tubs of Whip and Chill pudding and some spoons and she blushed a little. Treat was pointing to the poster of the rock singer.

"I took that when we put the down payment on our first house. My first big NASA check signed right over to the realtors. But she was in seventh heaven."

Brian managed to say that she was a nice-looking woman.

"That was before the cancer got her. Thing called chronic granulocytic leukemia caught hold of her and wore her down for two hard years before she give up the ghost. Course it's a thin line between what was caused by the cancer and what was caused by the radiation therapy, but for the person in pain it don't matter which is the culprit. She was sick to her stomach every morning, upchucked two meals out of three, didn't have a spark of energy."

Derry vacantly spooned pudding into her mouth. Treat's voice had taken on a detached tone, like a senile parish priest reciting the financial report.

"Cancer," he said, "is when cells begin to divide out of control. In my wife's case it was too many white corpuscles being produced in her blood. It spreads, cancer does, with out-of-control cells affecting the neighboring cells and making them go crazy too.

"Nuclear fission is cancer on the level of the atom. Unstable elements are bombarded by free neutrons that cause the atoms to split into smaller atoms. The bonding energy of the original atom is released along with more free neutrons that make neighboring heavy atoms go crazy in a chain reaction. Out of control. So more energy is released. Seismic energy and heat energy and nuclear radiation. Buildings falling and fires and radiation sickness."

Derry sighed and closed her eyes.

"They gave her X-ray treatments. We can control it, they said, it kills off white corpuscles. She'd eat a sandwich and her gums would stain the bread pink. They took her female business out. There were hairs grew on her chest.

"We can control it, they say, we've harnessed the Dragon. Keep things.even with the other side and nobody will dare make the first move. Or if they do it'll be a limited war. Limited.

"We've got the cancer under control, they told me, and then her bone marrow went wrong from all the X-ray exposure and they tried to draw it all out and replace it but her heart just quit. Had to keep it under control, they told me, it was her only hope."

Ira Treat laid his fork down on an empty plate.

Brian didn't know what he was expected to say. He had his own problems. His attention was drifting, not so much on to other subjects as out into the room in a very physical way. It was as if his mind were matter and that matter was diffusing into the air like some trace element, some gas. He was losing his bonding energy. He squeezed his head with his hands to push it all back in but the effect was a distant pressure, as if a light truck had driven over the shelter on the land's surface. Brian was grateful for the lead lining, the steel-reinforced concrete that surrounded him, that kept him from mingling with soil and sky.

Derry asked could she finish his Whip and Chill if he wasn't interested.

They sat in the living-room section of the main chamber. The fewer walls there were, the easier for Treat to keep an ear on his instruments. Derry rinsed what dishes there were and put them in the washer, then sprawled on a couch across from them to read a fan magazine while her father talked. Brian took to reciting Hail Marys and Our Fathers to try to keep an anchor on his mind.

"Do you know what 'BM' stands for?"

"Huh?"

"Ballistic missile. A big bullet. Didn't have such things till the very end of the Big One, when Germany got their V-i's and V-2's mailing out. We had bombers. Fat Man and Little Boy were delivered by manned crews, Nips had had a few Zeros in the right place and it would have been a different story on Hiroshima. But it wasn't long before both the Reds and us had BM's and push-button war was upon us. We had the real goods in the payload department to ourselves for a couple years, but Mrs. Rosenberg helped bring a speedy end to that situation."

Brian had only a vague idea of what the man was talking about. It all made him think of mushrooms. Mushrooms were the last thing he wanted to think about.