“If he comes back,” Mike whispered, tense and not daring to hope, “can we go see him? Can we look at him?”
Bob Foster pulled himself up to a sitting position. His bony arms were bare and white; his lean face was drab with weariness. And resignation. “How much was that damn thing you saw?” he demanded hoarsely. “That bomb shelter?”
Mike’s heart stopped beating. “Twenty thousand dollars.”
“This is Thursday. I’ll go down with you and your mother next Saturday.” Bob Foster knocked out his smoldering, half-lit pipe. “I'll get it on the easy-payment plan. The fall buying season is coming up, soon. I usually do good—people buy wood furniture for Christmas gifts.” He got up abruptly from the couch. “Is it a deal?”
Mike couldn’t answer; he could only nod.
“Fine,” his father said, with desperate cheerfulness. “Now you won’t have to go down and look at it in the window.”
The shelter was installed—at an additional two hundred dollars—by a fast-working team of laborers in brown coats with the words GENERAL ELECTRONICS stitched across their backs. The back yard was quickly restored, dirt and shrubs spaded in place, the surface smoothed over, and the bill respectfully slipped under the front door. The lumbering delivery truck, now empty, clattered off down the street and the neighborhood was again silent.
Mike Foster stood with his mother and a small group of admiring neighbors on the back porch of the house. “Well,” Mrs. Carlyle said finally, “now you’ve got a shelter. The best there is.”
“That’s right,” Ruth Foster agreed. She was conscious of the people around her; it had been some time since so many had shown up at once. Grim satisfaction filled her gaunt frame, almost resentment. “It certainly makes a difference,” she said harshly.
“Yes,” Mr. Douglas from down the street agreed. “Now you have someplace to go.” He had picked up the thick book of instructions the laborers had left. “It says here you can stock it for a whole year. Live down there twelve months without coming up once.” He shook his head admiringly. “Mine’s an old ’69 modeL Good for only six months. I guess maybe ”
“It’s still good enough for us,” his wife cut in, but there was a longing wistfulness in her voice. “Can we go down and peek at it, Ruth? It’s all ready, isn’t it?”
Mike made a strangled noise and moved jerkily forward. His mother smiled understandingly. “He has to go down there first. He gets first look at it—it’s really for him, you know.”
Their arms folded against the chill September wind, the group of men and women stood waiting and watching, as the boy approached the neck of the shelter and halted a few steps in front of it.
He entered the shelter carefully, almost afraid to touch anything. The neck was big for him; it was built to admit a full grown man. As soon as his weight was on the descent lift it dropped beneath him. With a breathless whoosh it plummeted down the pitch-black tube to the body of the shelter. The lift slammed hard against its shock-absorbers and the boy stumbled from it. The lift shot back to the surface, simultaneously sealing off the subsurface shelter, an impassable steel and plastic cork in the narrow neck.
Lights had come on around him automatically. The shelter was bare and empty; no supplies had yet been carried down. It smelled of varnish and motor grease: below him the generators were throbbing dully. His presence activated the purifying and decontamination systems; on the blank concrete wall meters and dials moved into sudden activity.
He sat down on the floor, knees drawn up, face solemn, eyes wide. There was no sound but the generators; the world above was completely cut off. He was in a little self- contained cosmos: everything needed was here—or would be here, soon. Food, water, air, things to do. Nothing else was wanted. He could reach out and touch—whatever he needed. He could stay here forever, through all time, without stirring. Complete and entire. Not lacking, not fearing, with only the sound of the generators purring below him. and the sheer, ascetic walls around and above him on all sides, faintly warm, completely friendly, like a living container.
Suddenly he shouted, a loud jubilant shout that echoed and bounced from wall to wall. He was deafened by the reverberation. He shut his eyes tight and clenched his fists. Joy filled him. He shouted again—and let the roar of sound lap over him, his own voice reinforced by the near walls, close and hard and incredibly powerful.
The kids in school knew even before he showed up, the next morning. They greeted him as he approached, all of them grinning and nudging each other. “Is it true your folks got a new General Electronics Model S-72ft?” Earl Peters demanded.
“That’s right,” Mike answered. His heart swelled with a peaceful confidence he had never known. “Drop around,” he said, as casually as he could. “I’ll show it to you.”
He passed on, conscious of their envious faces.
“Well, Mike,” Mrs. Cummings said, as he was leaving the classroom at the end of the day. “How does it feel?” He halted by her desk, shy and full of quiet pride. “It feels good,” he admitted.
“Is your father contributing to the NATS?”
“Yes.”
“And you’ve got a permit for our school shelter?”
He happily showed her the small blue seal clamped around his wrist. “He mailed a check to the city for everything. He said, ‘as long as I’ve gone this far I might as well go the rest of the way.”
“Now you have everything everybody else has.” The elderly woman smiled across at him. “I’m glad of that. You’re now a pro-P, except there’s no such term. You’re just—like everyone else.”
The next day the newsmachines shrilled out the news. The first revelation of the new Soviet bore-pellets.
Bob Foster stood in the middle of the living room, the newstape in his hands, his thin face flushed with fury and despair. “God damn it, it’s a plot!” His voice rose in baffled frenzy, “We just bought the thing and now look. Look!” He shoved the tape at his wife. “You see? I told you!”
“I’ve seen it,” Ruth said wildly. “I suppose you think the whole world was just waiting with you in mind. They’re always improving weapons, Bob. Last week it was those grain-impregnation flakes. This week it’s bore-pellets. You don’t expect them to stop the wheels of progress because you finally broke down and bought a shelter, do you?” The man and woman faced each other. “What the hell are we going to do?” Bob Foster asked quietly.
Ruth paced back into the kitchen. “I heard they were going to turn out adaptors.”
“Adaptors! What do you mean?”
“So people won’t have to buy new shelters. There was a commercial on the vidscreen. They’re going to put some kind of metal grill on the market, as soon as the government approves it. They spread it over the ground and it intercepts the bore-pellets. It screens them, makes them explode on the surface, so they can’t burrow down to the shelter.”
‘'How much?”
“They didn’t say.”
Mike Foster sat crouched on the sofa, listening. He had heard the news at school. They were taking their test on berry-identification, examining encased samples of wild berries to distinguish the harmless ones from the toxic, when the bell had announced a general assembly. The principal read them the news about the bore-pellets and then gave a routine lecture on emergency treatment of a new variant of typhus, recently developed.
His parents were still arguing. “We’ll have to get one,” Ruth Foster said calmly. “Otherwise it won’t make any difference whether we’ve got a shelter or not. The bore- pellets were specifically designed to penetrate the surface and seek out warmth. As soon as the Russians have them in production ”