He memorized this scene below as best he could and put the candle out to save as much of it as possible. He let himself down into the thick, dust-smelling darkness until he felt level floor under his boot soles. Qnce down, he relit the candle for a moment, and looked around.
The place was a treasure trove. Plainly no one had set foot here since the moment in which the house had been destroyed, and nothing had been looted from this part of the building’s original contents.
That night he slept warm and dry with even the luxury of a half-filled kerosene lantern he found there, to light him for a while. The next day he enlarged the entrance, and pulled the bike in out of sight. When he left the place, once more in daylight, two days later, through a separate, carefully tunneled hole much larger than the one by which he had entered, he was rich.
He left still more riches behind him. There was more than he and the bike could carry; but it was not just a lack of charity to his fellow human beings that made him carefully cover and disguise both openings to the place he had found. It was the hard-learned lesson to cover his trail so that no one would suspect someone else had been here and try to track him for what he carried. Otherwise, he would not have cared about the goods he left behind. For his path led still westward to Montana, to his brother Martin’s Twin Peaks Ranch—still eight hundred miles distant.
His riches, however, could not help going to his head a little. For one thing, he was taking a calculated risk, riding off in daylight, once more, on the bike. It was true that its motor was almost soundless. But it was an experimental, state-of-the-art device from the days when only those who knew him well had called him Jeebee.
To all others in those days—incredibly, only months before—he had been Jeeris Belamy Walthar. Even then the bike had been an experimental prototype of a vehicle under research, its battery rechargeable daily by sunlight falling on a blanket of miniature solar cells. A blanket which could be unfolded to create thirty-six square feet of energy-gathering surface, exposed to sunlight. Together, blanket and bike were priceless nowadays. It was also true that on it, in open country like this, he could probably outrun anyone else, including riders on horseback. But it was also an open invitation to attack and robbery in these catastrophic days; as a fat wallet had once been, flourished in a den of thieves.
Besides the bike, however, Jeebee had selected well. The compass that hung from a cord around his neck was sturdy and versatile; and his backpack contained, in addition to the precious solar-cell blanket, a Swiss army knife, some rope, twelve square feet of heat-reflecting plastic tarp, a medical kit, shaving kit, and a little food. Also a pair of binoculars—opera glasses—plus a thick, pencillike device containing a ceramic filter able to take out most bacteria down to two microns, some candles, a waterproof container of matches, an extra sweater, and extra underwear.
Now, as well, from the garage he had just left, he was wearing some other man’s old but still solidly seamed leather jacket. His belt was tight with screwdrivers, pruning knives, and other simple hand tools.
Canned food from looted houses and small game had fed Jeebee on his trip so far. But he had been running short of bullets—never having been much of a shot. Now, a small supply of additional ammunition for the take-apart .22 rifle he had been carrying was in the other pack on the bike’s rear-fender carrier. As well, in the cellar garage he had picked up a few canned goods, some of which might still be edible.
You could never tell until you opened a can and smelled its contents.
A final find, wrapped now around his waist above his belt, was a good twenty feet of heavy, solid-linked metal chain, taken from the cellar garage.
He had learned enough by this time not to follow any roads that might lead him to inhabited houses, or even small towns. So he cut off between the hills, on the same compass course westward that he had been holding to for the past two weeks, ever since he had run for his life to get away from Stoketon.
Even to think of Stoketon now set a cold sickness crawling about in the pit of his stomach. It had taken a miracle to save him. His buck fever had held true; and, at the last, when Buel Mannerly had risen up out of the weeds with the shotgun pointed at his head, he had been unable to shoot, though Buel was only seconds away from shooting him. Only the dumb luck of someone else from the village firing at Jeebee just then and scaring Buel into diving to the ground had cleared his way to tree cover and escape.
It was not only lack of guts on his part that had kept him from firing, Jeebee reminded himself now, strongly, steering the bike along a hillside in the sunlight and the light breeze. He, more than anyone else, should be able to remember that like everyone else, he was the product of his own part of the quantitative sociodynamics pattern; and it was that, more than anything else, which had stopped him from shooting Buel.
Once, in a civilized and technology-rich world, reactions like his had signaled a survival type. Now, they indicated the opposite. He glanced at his reflection in the rearview mirror, on the rod projecting from the left handlebar of the bike. The image of his lower face looked back at him, brutal with untrimmed beard and crafty with wrinkles dried into skin tanned by the sun and wind. But above these signs, as he tilted his head to look, the visor of his cap had shaded the skin and his forehead was still pale, the eyes still blue and innocent. The upper half of his features gave him away. He had no instinctive courage, only what was left of a sense of duty, a duty to a fledgling science, which had barely managed to be born before the world had fallen apart.
And a desperate, instinctive need to survive.
It had been fury over that failed duty that pushed him originally in the first few days of his escape from Stoketon. Without that, his spirit would have failed at the thought of the hundreds of unprotected miles between him and the safety of the Twin Peaks Ranch; where he could shelter behind a brother more adapted to these times. But what he had learned and worked at had driven him—the importance of a knowledge that must be saved for the future.
All around the world now there would be forty, perhaps as many as sixty, men and women—applied mathematicians and behavioral scientists like himself—sufficiently expert in the complexities of quantitative sociodynamics to have come independently to the same conclusion as he had. For a second the elegant mathematical notations danced before his mind’s eye, spelling out the unarguable truth about the human race in this spring of dissolution and disaster.
Like him, the others would have come to the conclusion that the knowledge of QSD must be protected, taken someplace safe, and hidden against the time—fifty or a thousand years from now—when the majority of the race would begin to change back again toward civilized patterns. Only if all those understanding the mathematics of QSD tried their best would there be even a chance of one of them succeeding in saving this great new tool for the next upswing of mankind.
It was a knowledge that could read both the present and the future. Because of it, they who had worked with it knew how vital it was. It must not be lost. Otherwise future generations could suffer another cycle like this one, of disintegration and chaos.
It was a bitter thing that the others, like himself, were non-survivors under these conditions. The very civilized intellectual nature of their own individual patterns unfitted them for the primitive, violent world that had now recreated itself around them. It was a cruel irony that they were the weakest, not the strongest, vessels to preserve what they alone knew needed to be preserved.
But they could try. He could try. Perhaps he could come to some terms with this time of savagery. It was ironic, also, after all the fears of worldwide nuclear destruction, the “greenhouse effect” and the like, that the world had actually died with a whimper, after all.
No—he corrected himself—not with a whimper. A snarl.
It had begun with a universal economic breakdown, complicated by overpopulation. A time of noise and ideas, of waste and heat. A time of frustration, mounting to frenzy, with unemployment and inflation soaring, worldwide.
In the end had come a total breakdown of resource distribution systems; with all of the predictable consequences reinforcing each other in a maelstrom of positive feedback—like a thermostat gone berserk, feeding more fuel to the furnace as room temperature rises. Predictable—and predicted by all the mathematical models of the study group to which Jeebee had belonged.
Even this was something for bitter inner laughter in Jeebee. Sociodynamics was new, but it had its roots in the pitifully simple, and artificially static, optimality models by which behavioral ecologists of an earlier time had predicted the foraging behavior of animals.
But when it had been applied to human society and the problems of modeling dynamic processes, the conclusions were as inevitable as they were terrifying. Independently, but almost simultaneously, the predictions
