Last night before I went to bed (in my own room again) I went out to the chicken yard, opened the gate, and scattered some chicken corn on the ground. So this morning, after I was dressed, I went out and looked. Sure enough, they had come back in, and there were three fresh eggs in the henhouse. I boiled them, toasted the last of the cornbread, made some coffee, and opened a tin of tomato juice. It made a respectable looking breakfast. I put it on a tray—also a jar of raspberry jam—and carried it out to the tent. The sun had just come over the ridge on the east, which meant it was about eight-thirty. Down the valley a couple of crows were calling. I felt happy and excited.
And to my surprise he was sitting up in the doorway of the tent.
“You’re better,” I said.
“For the moment,” he said. “At least I think I can eat something.”
I put the tray down in front of him and he stared at it.
“Amazing,” he said. He just whispered it.
“What?”
“This. Fresh eggs. Toast. Coffee. This valley. You, all by yourself. You are all by yourself?”
It was sort of a key question and he looked a little suspicious as he asked it, as if I, or someone, might be playing a trick on him. Still, there wasn’t any use pretending anything else.
“Yes.”
“And you managed to stay alive, and raise chickens and eggs and cows?”
“It hasn’t been so hard.”
“And the valley. How did it escape?”
“I don’t really understand that. Except that people always used to say the valley had its own weather.”
“A meteorological enclave. Some kind of an inversion. I suppose that’s a theoretical possibility. But the odds—'
I said: “You’d better eat. It will all get cold.”
If he was going to be too sick to eat later, he had better eat now, and build up his strength. As for the valley, I had wondered enough about it, especially in the first few months, when I was still expecting the deadness to creep in from outside. But it did not, and there was not much sense calling it a theoretical possibility when we were in it. At that point I did not know yet that he was a chemist, a scientist. And scientists won’t just accept things— they always have to try to figure them out.
He ate his breakfast. Then, still sitting up, he told me his name. And, of course, I told him mine.
“Ann Burden,” he said. “But weren’t there other people living in the valley?”
“My family,” I said. “And the people who owned the store, Mr and Mrs Klein.”
And I told him about how they drove away and never came back. Also about the Amish, and what my father had seen in Ogdentown.
“I suppose they kept going too long,” he said. “It’s hard not to, especially at first. I know. You keep hoping. And of course, so soon after the war there was still the nerve gas.”
“Nerve gas?”
“That’s what killed most of the people. In a way it’s better. They just went to sleep and never woke up.”
It had taken him ten weeks to get from Ithaca to the valley, and all that way, all that time, he had seen no living thing—no people, no animals, no birds, no trees, not even insects—only grey wasteland, empty highways and dead cities and towns. He had been ready to give up and turn back when he finally came over the ridge and saw, in the late evening, the haze of blue-green. At first he thought it was a lake, and, like all the other lakes he had come upon, dead. But the next morning by better light he saw that this green was different, a colour he had almost forgotten. As I had suspected, he still did not believe it, but came on to investigate anyway. Not until he came over Burden Hill did he know that he had finally found life. I had seen that for myself; that was when I first saw him.
He finished eating his breakfast; he ate it all and drank the coffee. But he was still weak, and started back into the tent to lie down on his sleeping bag.
“Why do you sleep in the tent?” I said. “If you are going to be sick again, the house would be better.”
He said: “The tent is radiation-proof.”
“But there is no radiation in the valley,” I said. “You have learned that.”
“I have,” he said. “But at first I didn’t trust it.”
“But you know now.”
“I do,” he said. “But now you have come back, and the house is yours.”
“If you are sick, and I am to take care of you, I can do it better in the house.”
He did not argue any longer, but got up, very shaky on his legs, and walked a few steps towards the house. He stopped. “I’m quite dizzy,” he said. “I’ll have to rest.”
“You can lean on me,” I said.
He put his hand on my shoulder, leaning quite heavily, and after a few minutes we went on. It took about ten minutes of this to get him to the house, up the porch steps, and into Joseph and David’s room, which fortunately is on the ground floor next to the living room. He lay on David’s bed and went to sleep. I got him a blanket.
He slept until about noon, and during that time I went down to the far field, past the pond, to get the two cows and the calf and put them back into the pasture. They had grown used to their new freedom, however, and did not want to go; they would not come when I called, so in the end I had to cut a stick and drive them in. Of course the calf kept running off in every direction but the right one, but I got the cows in and shut the gate. A few minutes later the calf was bawling to get in. I got the fresh cow (its mother) into the barn and milked her—she is still giving almost a gallon at each milking. Just the same, she is bound to go dry within a year, and then we will have a milkless, creamless, butterless period for a while, until the bull calf grows up. I’m not even sure how long that will take.
When I came back to the house Mr Loomis was just waking, but he stayed in bed. I made lunch, and then he told me some more of his story.
It began when he was a graduate student at Cornell. He was an organic chemist, doing research on plastics and polymers. (He explained that these are very long molecules used in making nylon, dacron and the stretchy kind of plastic wrap.) The head of the department in which he studied was a Professor Kylmer, a very famous man who had once won a Nobel prize.
Professor Kylmer had a research grant from the government, and worked part of the time at a special laboratory they had built for him, not at Cornell but in the mountains about twenty miles away. The whole thing was secret, but it had something to do with plastic and polymers, which were also the Professor’s speciality.
Mr Loomis knew the Professor fairly well (being his pupil), though he was not a very friendly man, but always completely wrapped up in his work. One day, however, he invited Mr Loomis into his private office in the Cornell chemistry building. He was obviously excited about something. He asked Mr Loomis, as soon as the door was shut, if he would like to come and work with him in the secret laboratory. He said that he had just made an important discovery, and needed to increase his staff to develop it. Mr Loomis, after thinking it over, accepted the offer—since, as the Professor explained, it was the same kind of research he was doing anyway, and this way he would get paid for doing it.
The discovery was a method of magnetizing plastic. Mr Loomis called it “polarizing”, but that means making it magnetic. Since the plastic was made of polymers, they called it “polapoly”.
That did not sound like too exciting a discovery to me, but when he explained what it was for, I could see that it was—or would seem so to the government. The point was that magnetism can stop, or at least turn aside, radiation. Mr Loomis reminded me (I had learned it at school) that it is the earth’s magnetic field that keeps us all from being killed by cosmic rays. So a magnetic plastic could be used to make a radiation-proof suit.
That was what the government—the Army, of course—wanted. So that troops could live on
This happened about three years before the war. The laboratory to which Mr Loomis reported the next day was eighty feet underground, a place as big as a house, hollowed out of a mountainside of solid rock. He worked there almost every day for the next three years, and often slept there, too—there were living quarters, so that when they got busy on some crucial test they did not need to drive back to Ithaca. They had stores of food and even a
