kitchen.
He soon learned that the project was more complicated than just making a plastic suit. There wasn’t much point in giving a soldier a safe-suit if he could not breathe the air around him, or drink the water. (Food rations, even cases of food, they could wrap in the plastic.) But Professor Kylmer had already started working on a variation of the plastic—a thin, slightly porous membrane that you could filter the water through. It worked this way: the worse the water was, the less you got, but what did come through was pure; the filter would not pass the radioactive part. Then they designed a similar membrane for air. That was harder, because the clean air coming out the other side had to be trapped and compressed into a tank. But they worked it out, all in a compact unit that a man could carry and operate with a hand pump.
These were (I now realized) the things Mr Loomis had brought with him—the greenish suit he was wearing when I first saw him, the air-tank on his back; the water filter, and a supply of purified water, had been in the wagon. The tent, of course, was the same stuff as the suit, and so was the wagon-cover.
They had designed all these in the laboratory, and finished a single pilot model of each, just before the war began. They had sent their report to Washington, and a team was coming from the Pentagon to test them. Then they would start production, not in the laboratory but in plastics factories all over the country.
But the men from the Pentagon never got there. It was all too late. The war broke out and was over before a single safe-suit was ever issued to a single soldier, much less a civilian.
On the night the bombing began, Mr Loomis was working late in the laboratory. He heard the news on the radio, and he decided to stay there, at least for the time being, to see how things went. He had a good supply of food—mostly army rations of freeze-dried things (which would keep indefinitely), for they had been testing the plastic for food packaging. Professor Kylmer was not there; he had gone back to Ithaca, and Mr Loomis never saw him again.
In the laboratory Mr Loomis also had the world’s only radiation-proof suit, and he had the air filter and the water filter.
Like me, he heard the radio stations go off one by one. Still he thought there might be other survivors in underground places like his—the Air Force, for instance, was supposed to have several shelters, all equipped so that the men in them could last for months. The difference was that if they
He stayed in the laboratory for three months, hoping the radiation level in the air outside would go down, but it did not. Then he began a series of expeditions. At first they were short ones. The suit had been carefully tested in the laboratory, and it was safe against all predictable radiation levels. But it had never actually been used “in the field”; so he was cautious, and it was lucky he was. His first impulse, for instance, was to get into his car and drive to Ithaca, the nearest big town. Before he did so, he checked the radioactivity inside the car, using a Geiger counter from the laboratory. He discovered it was
Since then he had tested hundreds of cars, and they were all the same—as he said, too hot to be safe. Even motorcycles were dangerous. Bicycles were better, but too difficult to ride in the bulky plastic suit. So he ended up walking and hauling his supplies in the wagon, which he had made himself out of bicycle parts and a big, light plywood carton covered with polapoly.
His first long trip was to the west, to where he knew there had been an underground Air Force command post. Using a map, he calculated the distance he had to cover each day, how long it would take, and how much freeze-dried food he would need. He knew he would not find anything edible along the way; there might be usable food at the underground post itself, but he could not count on that.
He found the Air base all right, barricaded, walled, fenced, with “Keep Out” signs starting a mile away. It was a shambles. Apparently men stationed in the barracks outside had tried to fight their way into the safe-room; local civilians had joined them, and in the battle grenades had been used. There were bodies everywhere, and no sign of life. He tried the lift but it did not work. Taking a torch, he climbed instead down a steep, ladder-like stairway next to the lift. After the first ten steps it was totally dark.
The command room itself, ninety steps further down, was relatively undamaged: a large oval room with maps on the walls, desks, telephones, and a bank of computers. Three dead men in uniform sat slumped over their desks; each had a loaded rifle next to him. Yet they had not been shot. They had died, Mr Loomis guessed, of asphyxiation; they would have depended for air on a bottled oxygen-mix, and someone, somewhere in the underground maze, had wrecked the circulation pumps.
He thought that did not really matter so much. Because all of the underground fallout shelters, this one and others around the world, had built-in time limits, enough air and water to last three months, six months, a year, on the assumption that after that it would be safe to go outside again. And that had not happened.
Mr Loomis had been telling all this as he lay in David’s bed, having finished eating his lunch. I could see that he was anxious to tell it, but that he was getting tired. When he finished what I have written here he reached to get a drink of water from the glass I had put on his lunch tray, but the glass was empty. I took the tray away to the kitchen, and the glass with it. I refilled it, and while I was taking it back I remembered one more thing I was really curious about.
I gave him the water and asked: “Who was Edward?” Because that was the name he had called me when he first saw me in the tent, when he was delirious.
For a second after I asked the question I thought the sickness had come back on him, because his eyes got a wild look again, as if he were seeing a nightmare. The hand holding the glass of water opened, and the glass slipped and fell to the floor. At the noise it made he shook his head and his eyes unclouded. Still he stared.
“How do you know about Edward?”
“When I first saw you,” I said, “in the tent, you called me Edward. Is something wrong? Are you sick?”
He relaxed. “It was a shock,” he said. “Edward was a man who worked in the laboratory with Dr Kylmer and me. But I didn’t think I had mentioned his name.”
I got him another glass of water and cleaned up the floor where the first one had fallen.
Chapter Seven
Four days have passed.
On the first day, Mr Loomis’s condition remained about the same. I gave him the fever thermometer, and we began keeping track of his temperature. It was about 99.5 degrees in the morning, went up to 101 in the middle of the day, and fell back to 99.5 in the evening. He said that meant he was still in the “interim” period.
I thought he should take some aspirin, but he said it would not do any real good, and that we should save it —the half dozen bottles in the store being perhaps the only usable aspirin left in the world. He said it seriously, but I had a feeling he was half joking.
I had a lot to do. With him in the valley—in the house—I decided I should cook better meals than I did when I was by myself. For one thing, as I said, if he was going to be sick he ought to build up his strength. Anyway, I like to cook, but when I was alone I frequently just did not bother—it seemed silly, just for one.
So I made several trips to the store for supplies. It was a tinned stuff, of course, or dried. There would not be anything fresh except milk and eggs until I could get the garden going again. Since it was already June, that was the most urgent thing; I wished now I had not dug it all up—I could be having fresh greens right now. Also the lettuce would have been ready. It was probably too late to start either of those again, but I decided to try anyway, and hope it stayed cool. I could at least get some to seed for next year. But I really longed for a salad, and fresh greens.
I got the spade and the hoe and went to work. Faro came up and sniffed the first few shovelfuls of earth I turned over. Then he dug a small hole of his own and lay on top of it. It was warm in the sun. He is already looking much better than he did at first.
