”
“I’ve seen cows,” Stu said thoughtfully.
“Cows, yes, and deer. But the horses are all dead.”
“You know, that’s right,” Stu agreed. He had seen several dead horses on his walk. In some cases cows had been grazing upwind of the bloating bodies. “Now why should that be?”
“No idea. We all respire in much the same way, and this seems to be primarily a respiratory disease. But I wonder if there isn’t some other factor? Men, dogs, and horses catch it. Cows and deer don’t. And rats were down for a while but now seem to be coming back.” Bateman was recklessly mixing paint on his palette. “Cats everywhere, a plague of cats, and from what I can see, the insects are going on pretty much as they always have. Of course, the littlefaux pasmankind commits rarely seem to affect them, anyway—and the thought of a mosquito with the flu is just too ridiculous to consider. None of it makes any surface sense. It’s crazy.”
“It sure is,” Stu said, and uncorked another beer. His head was buzzing pleasantly.
“We’re apt to see some interesting shifts in the ecology,” Bateman said. He was making the horrible mistake of trying to paint Kojak into his picture. “Remains to be seen ifHomo sapiensis going to be able to reproduce himself in the wake of this—it very much remains to be seen—but at least we can get together and try. But is Kojak going to find a mate? Is he ever going to become a proud papa?”
“Jesus, I guess he might not.”
Bateman stood, put his palette on his piano stool, and got a fresh beer. “I think you’re right,” he said. “There probably are other people, other dogs, other horses. But many of the animals may die without ever reproducing. There may be some animals of those susceptible species who were pregnant when the flu came along, of course. There may be dozens of healthy women in the United States right now who—pardon the crudity—have cakes baking in the oven. But some of the animals are apt to just sink below the point of no return. If you take the dogs out of the equation, the deer—who seem immune—are going to run wild. Certainly there aren’t enough men left around to keep the deer population down. Hunting season is going to be canceled for a few years.”
“Well,” Stu said, “the surplus deer will just starve.”
“No they won’t. Not all of them, not even most of them. Not up here, anyway. I can’t speak for what might happen in East Texas, but in New England, all the gardens were planted and growing nicely before this flu happened. The deer will have plenty to eat this year and next. Even after that, our crops will germinate wild. There won’t be any starving deer for maybe as long as seven years. If you come back this way in a few years, Stu, you’ll have to elbow deer out of your way to get up the road.”
Stu worked this over in his mind. Finally he said, “Aren’t you exaggerating?”
“Not on purpose. There may be a factor or factors I haven’t taken into consideration, but I honestly don’t think so. And we could take my hypothesis about the effect of the complete or almost complete subtraction of the dog population on the deer population and apply it to the relationships between other species. Cats breeding without check. What does that mean? Well, I said rats were down on the Ecological Exchange but making a comeback. If there are enough cats, that may change. A world without rats sounds good at first, but I wonder.”
“What did you mean when you said whether or not people could reproduce themselves was open to question?”
“There are two possibilities,” Bateman said. “At least two that I see now. The first is that the babies may not be immune.”
“You mean, die as soon as they get into the world?”
“Yes, or possiblyin utero . Less likely but still possible, the superflu may have had some sterility effect on those of us that are left.”
“That’s crazy,” Stu said.
“So’s the mumps,” Glen Bateman said dryly.
“But if the mothers of the babies that are… arein utero … if the mothers are immune—”
“Yes, in some cases immunities can be passed on from mother to child just as susceptibilities can. But not in all cases. You just can’t bank on it. I think the future of babies nowin uterois very uncertain. Their mothers are immune, granted, but statistical probability says that most of the fathers were not, and are now dead.”
“What’s the other possibility?”
“That we may finish the job of destroying our species ourselves,” Bateman said calmly. “I actually think that’s very possible. Not right away, because we’re all too scattered. But man is a gregarious, social animal; and eventually we’ll get back together, if only so we can tell each other stories about how we survived the great plague of 1990. Most of the societies that form are apt to be primitive dictatorships run by little Caesars unless we’re very lucky. A few may be enlightened, democratic communities, and I’ll tell you exactly what the necessary requirement for that kind of society in the 1990s and early 2000s is going to be: a community with enough technical people in it to get the lights back on. It could be done, and very easily. This isn’t the aftermath of a nuclear war, with everything laid to waste. All the machinery is just sitting there, waiting for someone to come along—the right someone, who knows how to clean the plugs and replace a few burned-out bearings—and start it up again. It’s all a question of how many of those who have been spared understand the technology we all took for granted.”
Stu sipped his beer. “Think so?”
“Sure.” Bateman took a swallow of his own beer, then leaned forward and smiled grimly at Stu. “Now let me give you a hypothetical situation, Mr. Stuart Redman from East Texas. Suppose we have Community A in Boston and Community B in Utica. They are aware of each other, and each community is aware of the conditions in the other community’s camp. Society A is in good shape. They are living on Beacon Hill in the lap of luxury because one of their members just happens to be a Con Ed repairman. This guy knows just enough to get the power plant which serves Beacon Hill running again. It would mostly be a matter of knowing which switches to pull when the plant went into an automatic shutdown. Once it’s running, it’s almost all automated anyhow. The repairman can teach other members of Society A which levers to pull and which gauges to watch. The turbines run on oil, of which there is a glut, because everybody who used to use it is as dead as old Dad’s hatband. So in Boston, the juice is flowing.
There’s heat against the cold, light so you can read at night, refrigeration so you can have your Scotch on the rocks like a civilized man. In fact, life is pretty damn near idyllic. No pollution. No drug problem. No race problem. No shortages. No money or barter problem, because all the goods, if not the services, are out on display and there are enough of them to last a radically reduced society for three centuries. Sociologically speaking, such a group would probably become communal in nature. No dictatorship here. The proper breeding ground for dictatorship, conditions of want, need, uncertainty, privation… they simply wouldn’t exist. Boston would probably end up being run by a town meeting form of government again.
“But Community B, up there in Utica. There’s no one to run the power plant. The technicians are all dead. It’s going to take a long time for them to figure out how to make things go again. In the meantime, they’re cold at night (and winter is coming), they’re eating out of cans, they’re miserable. A strongman takes over. They’re glad to have him because they’re confused and cold and sick. Lethimmake the decisions. And of course he does. He sends someone to Boston with a request. Will they send their pet technician up to Utica to help them get their power plant going again? The alternative is a long and dangerous move south for the winter. So what does Community A do when they get this message?”
“They send the guy?” Stu asked.
“Christ’s testicles,no!He might be held against his will, in fact it would be extremely likely. In the post-flu world, technological know-how is going to replace gold as the most perfect medium of exchange. And in those terms, Society A is rich and Society B is poor. So what does Society B do?”
“I guess they go south,” Stu said, then grinned. “Maybe even to East Texas.”
“Maybe. Or maybe they threaten the Boston people with a nuclear warhead.”
“Right,” Stu said. “They can’t get their power plant going, but they can fire a nuclear missile at Beantown.”
Bateman said, “If it was me, I wouldn’t bother with a missile. I’d just try to figure out how to detach the warhead, then drive it to Boston in a station wagon. Think that would work?”
“Dogged if I know.”
“Even if it didn’t, there are plenty of conventional weapons around. That’s the point.Allof that stuff is lying around, waiting to be picked up. And if Communities A and B both have pet technicians, they might work up some kind of rusty nuclear exchange over religion, or territoriality or some paltry ideological difference. Just think, instead of six or seven world nuclear powers, we may end up with sixty or seventy of them right here in the continental United States. If the situation were different, I’m sure that there would be fighting with rocks and spiked clubs. But the fact is, all the old soldiers have faded away and left their playthings behind. It’s a grim thing to be thinking about, especially after so many grim things have already happened… but I’m afraid it’s entirely possible.”
A silence fell between them. Far off they could hear Kojak barking in the woods as the day turned on its noontime axis.
“You know,” Bateman said finally, “I’m fundamentally a cheerful man. Maybe because I have a low threshold of satisfaction. It’s made me greatly disliked in my field. I have my faults; I talk too much, as you’ve heard, and I’m a terrible painter, as you’ve seen, and I used to be terribly unwise with money. I sometimes spent the last three days before payday eating peanut butter sandwiches and I was notorious in Woodsville for opening savings accounts and then closing them out a week later. But I never really let it get me down, Stu. Eccentric but cheerful, that’s me. The only bane of my life has been my dreams. Ever since boyhood I’ve been plagued by amazingly vivid dreams. A lot of them have been nasty. As a youngster it was trolls under bridges that reached up and grabbed my foot or a witch that turned me into a bird… I would open my mouth to scream, and nothing but a string of caws would come out. Do you ever have bad dreams, Stu?”
“Sometimes,” Stu said, thinking of Elder, and how Elder lurched after him in his nightmares, and of the corridors that never ended but only switched back on themselves, lit by cold fluorescents and filled with echoes.
“Then you know. When I was a teenager, I had the regular quota of sexy dreams, both wet and dry, but these were sometimes interspersed with dreams in which the girl I was with would change into a toad, or a snake, or even a decaying corpse. As I grew older I had dreams of failure, dreams of degradation, dreams of suicide, dreams of horrible accidental death. The most recurrent was one where I was slowly being crushed to death under a gas station lift. All simple permutations of the troll-dream, I suppose. I really believe that such dreams are a simple psychological emetic, and the people who have them are more blessed than cursed.”
“If you get rid of it, it doesn’t pile up.”
“Exactly. There are all sorts of dream interpretations, Freud’s being the most notorious, but I have always believed they served a simple eliminatory function, and not much more—that dreams are the psyche’s way of taking a good dump every now and then. And that people who don’t dream—or don’t dream in away they can often remember when they wake up—are mentally constipated in some way. After all, the only practical compensation for having a nightmare is waking up and realizing it was all just a dream.”
Stu smiled.
“But lately, I’ve had an extremely bad dream. It recurs, like my dream of being crushed to death under the lift, but it makes that one look like a pussycat in comparison. It’s like no other dream I’ve ever had, but somehow it’s like all of them. As if… as if it were thesumof all bad dreams. And I wake up feeling bad, as if it wasn’t a dream at all, but a vision. I know how crazy that must sound.”
“What is it?”
“It’s a man,” Bateman said quietly. “At least, I think it’s a man. He’s standing on the roof of a high building, or maybe it’s a cliff that he’s on. Whatever it is, it’s so high that it sheers away into mist thousands of feet below. It’s near sunset, but he’s looking the other way, east. Sometimes he seems to be wearing bluejeans and a denim jacket, but more often he’s in a robe with a cowl. I can never see his face, but I can see his eyes. He has red eyes.