«It’s the jedgment o’ God, for the sins o’ our leaders,» persisted the woman. «The plague, the fire-death, all that, ain’t it foretold in the Bible? Ain’t we living in the last days o’ the world?»
«Maybe.» Drummond was glad to stop before a long low cabin. Religious argument was touchy at best, and with a lot of people nowadays it was dynamite.
They entered the rudely furnished but fairly comfortable structure. A good many crowded in with them. For all their suspicion, they were curious, and an outsider in an aircraft was a blue-moon event these days.
Drummond’s eyes flickered unobtrusively about the room, noticing details. Three women—that meant a return to concubinage. Only to be expected in a day of few men and strong-arm rule. Ornaments and utensils, tools and weapons of good quality—yes, that confirmed the stories. This wasn’t exactly a bandit town, but it had waylaid travelers and raided other places when times were hard, and built up a sort of dominance of the surrounding country. That, too, was common.
There was a dog on the floor nursing a litter. Only three pups, and one of those was bald, one lacked ears, and one had more toes than it should. Among the wide-eyed children present, there were several two years old or less, and with almost no obvious exceptions, they were also different.
Drummond sighed heavily and sat down. In a way, this clinched it. He’d known for a long time, and finding mutation here, as far as any place from atomic destruction, was about the last evidence he needed.
He had to get on friendly terms, or he wouldn’t find out much about things like population, food production, and whatever else there was to know. Forcing a smile to stiff lips, he took a flask from his jacket. «Prewar rye,» he said. «Who wants a nip?»
«Do we!» The answer barked out in a dozen voices and words. The flask circulated, men pawing and cursing and grabbing to get at it. Their homebrew must be pretty bad, thought Drummond wryly.
The chief shouted an order, and one of his women got busy at the primitive stove. «Rustle you a mess o’ chow,» he said heartily. «An’ my name’s Sam Buckman.»
«Pleased to meet you, Sam.» Drummond squeezed the hairy paw hard. He had to show he wasn’t a weakling, a conniving city slicker.
«What’s it like, outside?» asked someone presently. «We ain’t heard for so long—»
«You haven’t missed much,» said Drummond between bites.
The food was pretty good. Briefly, he sketched conditions. «You’re better off than most,» he finished.
«Yeah. Mebbe so.» Sam Buckman scratched his tangled beard. «What I’d give f’r a razor blade—! It ain’t easy, though. The first year we weren’t no better off ’n anyone else. Me, I’m a farmer, I kept some ears o’ corn an’ a little wheat an’ barley in my pockets all that winter, even though I was starving. A bunch o’ hungry refugees plundered my place, but I got away an’ drifted up here. Next year I took an empty farm here an’ started over.»
Drummond doubted that it had been abandoned, but said nothing. Sheer survival outweighed a lot of considerations.
«Others came an’ settled here,» said the leader reminiscently. «We farm together. We have to; one man couldn’t live by hisself, not with the bugs an’ blight, an’ the crops sproutin’ into all new kinds, an’ the outlaws aroun’. Not many up here, though we did beat off some enemy troops last winter.» He glowed with pride at that, but Drummond wasn’t particularly impressed. A handful of freezing starveling conscripts, lost and bewildered in a foreign enemy’s land, with no hope of ever getting home, weren’t formidable.
«Things getting better, though,» said Buckman. «We’re heading up.» He scowled blackly, and a palpable chill crept into the room. «If ’twern’t for the births—»
«Yes—the births. The new babies. Even the stock an’ plants.» It was an old man speaking, his eyes glazed with near madness. «It’s the mark o’ the beast. Satan is loose in the world—»
«Shut up!» Huge and bristling with wrath, Buckman launched himself out of his seat and grabbed the oldster by his scrawny throat. «Shut up ’r I’ll bash y’r lying head in. Ain’t no son o’ mine being marked by the devil.»
«Or mine—» «Or mine—» The rumble of voices ran about the cabin, sullen and afraid.
«It’s God’s judgment, I tell you!» The woman was shrilling again. «The end o’ the world is near. Prepare f’r the second coming—»
«An’ you shut up too, Mag Schmidt,» snarled Buckman. He stood bent over, gnarled arms swinging loose, hands flexing, little eyes darting red and wild about the room. «Shut y’ trap an’ keep it shut. I’m still boss here, an’ if you don’t like it you can get out. I still don’t think that gunny-looking brat o’ y’rs fell in the lake by accident.»
The woman shrank back, lips tight. The room filled with crackling silence. One of the babies began to cry. It had two heads.
Slowly and heavily, Buckman turned to Drummond, who sat immobile against the wall. «You see?» he asked dully «You see how it is? Maybe it is the curse o’ God. Maybe the world is ending. I dunno. I just know there’s few enough babies, an’ most o’ them deformed. Will it go on? Will all our kids be monsters? Should we… kill these an’ hope we get some human babies? What is it? What to do?»
Drummond rose. He felt a weight as of centuries on shoulders, the weariness, blank and absolute, of having seen that smoldering panic and heard that desperate appeal too often, too often.
«Don’t kill them,» he said. «That’s the worst kind of murder, and anyway it’d do no good at all. It comes from the bombs, and you can’t stop it. You’ll go right on having such children so you might as well get used to it.»
By atomic-powered stratojet it wasn’t far from Minnesota to Oregon, and Drummond landed in Taylor about noon the next day. This time there was no hurry to get his machine under cover, and up on the mountain was a raw scar of earth where a new airfield was slowly being built. Men were getting over their terror of the sky. They had another fear to face now, and it was one from which there was no hiding.
Drummond walked slowly down the icy main street to the central office. It was numbingly cold, a still, relentless intensity of frost eating through clothes and flesh and bone. It wasn’t much better inside. Heating systems were still poor improvisations.
«You’re back!» Robinson met him in the antechamber suddenly galvanized with eagerness. He had grown thin and nervous, looking ten years older, but impatience blazed from him. «How is it? How is it?»
Drummond held up a bulky notebook. «All here,» he said grimly. «All the facts we’ll need. Not formally correlated yet. But the picture is simple enough.»
Robinson laid an arm on his shoulder and steered him into the office. He felt the general’s hand shaking, but he’d sat down and had a drink before business came up again.
«You’ve done a good job,» said the leader warmly. «When the country’s organized again, I’ll see you get a medal for this. Your men in the other planes aren’t in yet.»
«No, they’ll be gathering data for a long time. The job won’t be finished for years. I’ve only got a general outline here, but it’s enough. It’s enough.» Drummond’s eyes were haunted again.
Robinson felt cold at meeting that too-steady gaze. He whispered shakily: «Is it—bad?»
«The worst. Physically, the country’s recovering. But biologically, we’ve reached a crossroads and taken the wrong fork.»
«What do you mean? What do you mean?»
Drummond let him have it then, straight and hard as a bayonet thrust. «The birth rate’s a little over half the prewar,» he said, «and about seventy-five per cent of all births are mutant, of which possibly two-thirds are viable and presumably fertile. Of course, that doesn’t include late-maturing characteristics, or those undetectable by naked-eye observation, or the mutated recessive genes that must be carried by a lot of otherwise normal zygotes. And it’s everywhere. There are no safe places.»