Z for Zachariah

was much too soon, and he was very sick. We would talk about it when he had finally recovered.

And I thought: what would it be like, ten years from now, to be up here gathering greens some morning with children of my own. But that thought made me feel homesick for my mother, a feeling I have tried hard to avoid. So I stood up to change the subject. I got out my pocket knife and cut a bunch of apple blossoms. Mr Loomis could have a bouquet for his sickroom.

I started back to the house. On the way back the sun appeared over the ridge, but some clouds followed it almost immediately, and the chill stayed in the air. That was good, because I still had the rest of the garden to plant, and since it was late in the season, the cooler the weather stayed the better it would do.

At the house everything was quiet. I put the flowers in a vase and the greens in the cold cellar; they would be for dinner, in the nature of a surprise. Then I cooked breakfast—eggs, tinned ham, and some pan biscuits. I really wished then that I had that wood stove moved in from the barn so that I could have a real oven, and do some proper baking. I decided that tomorrow I might try those bolts and see if I could dismantle it.

I put the breakfast and the vase of flowers on a tray and knocked on his door, which was partly open. There was no answer so I pushed it wider, looked in, and learned why the house was so quiet—he was not there.

Immediately I was worried, very worried. I realized that it was stupid of me to have left him alone, knowing that he had had the nightmare, knowing that it might have been the beginning of the high fever. He might be, right now, wandering somewhere in a delirium. In the house? I called, but there was no answer. I put the tray down, setting the breakfast near the fire where it would stay warm, and ran to the front door.

It was all right. I saw him immediately, across the road not far from Burden Creek, sitting on a large round stone. He had the Geiger counter with him, the one with the earphone; he was staring at the creek, looking upstream.

I walked over to him, and he looked up when he saw me coming. He said: “I thought you had run away.”

“Are you all right?” I was still worried.

“Yes,” he said. “In fact I woke up feeling so much better that I began to wonder about this water—whether maybe you had read the meter wrong, or whether the counter was off. So I walked over to check it with this one.”

Oh, I hoped I had read it wrong! I never hoped anything so much.

But I had not. He went on: “It was no use. Your reading was right. There’s just no way I could have got less than three hundred r’s.” He must have felt disappointed, but he said it calmly, as before; he did not sound frightened.

I said: “I wish I had been wrong.”

“It’s no worse than before,” he said. “It was just a hope. Anyway, since you weren’t here, I sat down and started thinking about that stream.”

“Thinking what?”

“It’s radioactive, there’s no doubt about that. But that’s no reason it shouldn’t be useful. Up there”—he pointed to a place a hundred feet upstream, a rocky place where a big boulder blocked the creek and made a little waterfall—“there’s a sort of a natural dam. It looks as if somebody, sometime, even tried to add to it.”

“That’s true,” I said. “My father said that my greatgrandfather had a small mill there, a flour mill. We thought the stone you’re sitting on was part of it, it’s worn so smooth.”

“What I was thinking about was not a mill, but electricity. If I could build that dam up a few feet higher— there’s a good flow of water. It could run a small generator.”

“But we don’t have a generator. Anyway, if we tried to build a dam we’d get the water on ourselves. It’s too dangerous.”

“Not if I was wearing the safe-suit, and if I was careful. And the generator is easy. You can make one out of any electric motor—with a little tinkering.”

“But where would we get an electric motor?” Then I remembered. There were two or three of them in the barn, in my father’s workshop. One, I know, was hooked up to a grindstone, another to a circular saw. I told Mr Loomis, and he smiled.

“There are always motors around a farm. The hard part will be the water wheel. But I think I can make one. I’ll need some lumber and some kind of an axle. It won’t be fancy, but it will work.”

“Would it light the lights?”

“Yes. They might be a bit flickery, but they’d light. Mainly, it would run your refrigerator, your freezer, things like that. They don’t use much current.”

It would be nice to have a refrigerator again. And a freezer! I could freeze vegetables and fruit for the winter.

And that reminded me. His breakfast was drying up by the fire. And I had had nothing to eat yet myself, except some milk and a couple of sprigs of field cress.

After breakfast I milked the cow and planted some more of the garden: melons, beets, and several rows of beans. I had some seed potatoes left; they looked pretty dried up but I felt so optimistic and energetic I planted them anyway. They might revive.

Then I went to the house to get my fishing rod and to tell Mr Loomis (lying down) I was going to the pond.

He sat up on the side of the bed.

He said: “Do you think—' I waited. “Well, I’d like to go with you.”

“To fish?” I was torn. It would be fun to have him go but the pond is more than a quarter of a mile away. “How is your fever?”

“About the same. About a hundred, not so bad.”

“It’s chilly out.”

“I could take a blanket.”

“I’ll get you a coat.” In the hall cupboard I found an old cloth raincoat of my father’s. I thought it would not do him any harm, and it was something for him to do.

“Do you really want to fish?” I asked him.

He looked embarrassed. “I never have. I don’t know how.”

“I can show you. It’s very easy, at least the way I do it. I just put a worm on the hook and throw it in. Sometimes I use a float, sometimes not.”

“A float?” He really did not know how to fish.

“A little ball made of cork.” I pulled one out of my pocket and showed him. “It keeps the hook off the bottom.”

“Have you got an extra one?”

“Yes,” I said, “and I can get David’s rod.” It was in his cupboard.

We started out for the pond, with him wearing my father’s coat and carrying David’s fishing pole. But we did not make it. After about a hundred yards he began walking very slowly; he stumbled and dropped the rod.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t go on.” He had turned extremely pale, a bluish colour. He looked terrible.

“Lean on me,” I said. “Leave the rod. We’ll go back.”

“It’s the anaemia,” he said. “I should have known. It’s the dependable part of the disease. Five to seven days after exposure. This is the sixth day.”

We started back, very slowly. He could hardly stand up.

I said: “You’d better lie down.”

“Yes.” He sank to the grass at the side of the road, lay on his back and closed his eyes. But his colour slowly got better.

“It came so suddenly,” I said.

“No. It was the walking. I knew I had it a little.”

“What should I do?”

“Nothing. Help me back to the house. Then go fishing.”

So I did that. When we got back to the house I sat beside his bed for a while, and then went on to the pond. But it was a nervous and disappointed kind of fishing. He had explained that the anaemia would not get any worse, but it meant that he would not be able to do much now until he had gone through the whole illness and recovered. Then it should gradually go away. Still I felt as if it was the beginning of the end—no, not the end, but of a bad time,