Knefhausen hesitated, but what choice did one after all have? "Very well. I can of course tell you little that is not apparent. Have you complied with the instructions and grounded all nuclear aircraft?"
Amos's eyes narrowed. "Not questions, Knefhausen. Answers!"
"Very well. But what is there to say? 'Heavier particles' no doubt refers to some sort of nucleides, for what purpose I cannot conjecture, although from the reference to 'dead and broken' one may suspect—"
"And I don't want to hear what you suspect, either! I want you to tell me—oh, damn the lights!" They had gone out completely, and only a faint sunset glow through the shuttered windows let them see each other.
In the old heart of Dieter von Knefhausen a thrill of both fear and excitement struck. He watched Amos stab at buttons on his desk, and swear when there was no response; and then, howling with surprise and pain, wrench his wrist-watch off his arm and hurl it to the floor, rubbing the scorched skin.
Knefhausen could not know just what had happened; he had no instruments; he had been through too much for his wits to be entirely about him; he was too tired and perhaps too old. But he could observe the results as the kaons struck, and could guess that it was the end of radioactivity on the surface of the Earth.
Fortunately the kaons did not penetrate very deep. If the nucleides at the core had broken apart the planet could not have survived it. But he could see that much had broken apart already, of what little in the world he had known had managed to survive.
There was a noise at the door, and an Army doctor burst in. "The President!" she cried. "The life-support system isn't working! His signs are flat!"
Knefhausen nodded thoughtfully and walked over to a chair. "I think," he said, "there is now no longer a need to speculate at what it is that is coming to us, for it has arrived."
19
SINCE I DON'T HAVE ANYONE MUCH TO TALK TO, I TALK TO myself. I look in my mirror, at that ugly old face that's really only about thirty-eight years old, well, maybe forty or so but certainly not much over, and I say: "Hello, Eve Barstow. Let me introduce myself. I'm Evelyn Clarissa Letterman. You used to be me, you know, before you married that good-looking Jim Barstow. Heaven knows who you are now." And heaven does know, I hope, because I am not sure I always do. Mostly I am called Aunt Eve, and mostly by the kids. The grownups seldom call me at all. And what I mostly do is tend the truck garden and the cabbage patch.
It isn't just that my fellow pioneers don't much want to talk to me. I'm not thrilled to be talking to any of them, either. Their conversation never did much to raise my spirits, even when I could understand what they said.
I used the word "said" very loosely, for they have evolved their own quicker, preciser ways of communicating. Old married couples rub together for half a century before they understand that his yawn means he doesn't agree and she signifies depression by sewing curtains. My dears didn't take that long. They didn't confine it to their true spouses, either. My God, no. Jim said so little to me over the years that, without the kids, I would surely have lost the power of speech while he was smacking his lips and snapping his fingers and twitching his toes and his nose and, I swear, his ears and his scalp to Flo and Ski and Dot and even now and then to some of the kids. But never, ever, to me. All right. I'm the dummy.. I don't care. I don't want to hear what they're saying anyway. I do sometimes want them to hear me, to be sure. That's mostly when I think they're doing something wrong, which is a lot of the time. They don't listen to that, either. They didn't even listen to me when we found out what Shef and Ann had been doing. They don't care if I oppose them, and they don't even care if I approve. (Do you care if a daisy approves when you pluck its petals?)
Sometimes I wonder what has happened to us. I pull out the family album I have meticulously hung onto through all these years. There are our prelaunch pictures, with the King of England kissing Dot Letski's hand, and the President of the United States, looking like Bugs Bunny in a morning coat, pinning a ribbon on Shef. The grownups won't even look. Even the older kids are pretty tired of Aunt Eve's photographs, although the littlest ones are generally thrilled with them. Or pretend to be.
We have all changed so very much since those pictures. Shef is a stick figure of himself, less than a hundred pounds, his Ruggero the Gnome King whiskers flying all around his head. I think he starches them. Or perhaps it is only willpower that stretches them taut. Flo has become grossly fat. She says it has to be that way so she can accommodate two uterine lobes working at once, since she is a frequent mommy. But it is also from eating too much. As to the late Will Becklund—well, Will is what he chooses to be, and mostly he chooses to be nearly invisible. So we are rather an odd-looking lot, skeletal Shef, gross Flo, pyknic Dot, bent Ski, willowy Ann—not to mention my lord and master Jim, who seems to have sagged all of his innards into a potbelly you cannot imagine. I am the only mesomorph in the bunch and even I, I must confess, no longer trim my nails or blow-dry my hair. Add in the scuttling littlest kids and the half-civilized older ones and, if you want to know what we all look like, go to any swamp and tip over a rock.
I will not speak of the other sensory impressions you might get of the lot of us, or at least not of the smells.
As to the sounds, ah, my God, how strange! Back when the U. S. of A. really cared about us they used to transmit cheer-up tapes. I have one of all of us on "Meet the Press" —steam radio, not TV— broadcast over the American propaganda network so that all the world could hear what delicious middle-American types we all were. And we really were. Shef's Tulsa, Ann's Bryn Mawr, just a hint of Brooklyn in Ski. Now, my heavens! None of the grownups speak English anymore, or at least not if they can help it. Except to me, and there they try when they have to but don't always succeed. Shef has completely lost the knack, and uses a computer translator to convert those majestic thoughts of his into words I can understand, but I would not say that it works at all well. The children speak pretty good English, it's true. But for some reason or other they'd rather talk to each other than to any of us. You've heard of a generation gap? No. You just think you have. Here on the old Constitution we've raised a race of enemies. I don't know why. Except that we original eight have ourselves become quite inimical people, or seven-eighths of us have.
The Holocaust was Jim's fault, originally. For all I know they were all in it, but it was James Madison Barstow, my dear whilom Ail-American hubby, who was our resident nuclear wizard, custodian of quarks, basher with the big stick. Way back in circumsolar space he began tinkering with the ship's fusion drive. Along about midpoint he rebuilt it. Well, that produced both good news and bad news. The good news was that it worked a lot better. The bad news, not counting that it killed old Will, was that he got Shef interested in his hadron hatchery, and, oh, how I wish that had not happened!