VICHY, June 23.—The Vichy government announces the execution of twelve hostages for the recent sabotage at the Barras plant near *** and the murder of Colonel Heinz von Schwarzenau on June 12th. “The Jews and Communists involved in the treachery,” the announcement reads, “have not yet been apprehended. It is believed that they were aided and reinforced by a party of Commando troops. Twelve more hostages will be shot daily until they are under arrest.
“But you know, old boy,” young Wrothbottam insisted, “that’s devilish peculiar. There was no Commando raid at *** on the twelfth. And what’s odder yet, there was one on the thirteenth. Reported operations successful, but there hasn’t been a word about it in the Vichy dispatches.”
Transfer Point
There were three of them in the retreat, three out of all mankind safe from the yellow bands.
The great Kirth-Labbery himself had constructed the retreat and its extraordinary air-conditioning—not because his scientific genius had foreseen the coming of agnoton and the end of the human race, but quite simply because he itched.
And here Vyrko sat, methodically recording the destruction of mankind, once in a straight factual record, for the instruction of future readers (“if any,” he added wryly to himself), and again as a canto in that epic of Man which he never expected to complete but for which he lived.
Lavra’s long golden hair fell over his shoulders. It was odd that its scent distracted him when he was at work on the factual record, yet seemed at times to wing the lines of the epic.
“But why bother?” she asked. Her speech might have been clearer if her tongue had not been more preoccupied with the savor of the apple than with the articulation of words. But Vyrko understood readily; the remark was as familiar an opening as P-K4.
“It’s my duty,” Vyrko explained patiently. “I haven’t your father’s scientific knowledge and perception. Your father’s? I haven’t the knowledge of his humblest lab assistant. But I can put words together so that they make sense and sometimes more than sense, and I have to do this.”
From Lavra’s plump red lips an apple pip fell into the works of the electronic typewriter. Vyrko fished it out automatically; this too was part of the gambit, with the possible variants of grape seed, orange peel . . .
“But why,” Lavra demanded petulantly, “won’t Father let us leave here? A girl might as well be in a—a—”
“Convent?” Vyrko suggested. He was a good amateur paleolinguist. “There is an analogy—even despite my presence. Convents were supposed to shelter girls from the Perils of The World. Now the whole world is one Peril—outside of this retreat.”
“Go on,” Lavra said. She had long ago learned, Vyrko suspected, that he was a faintly over-serious young man with no small talk, and that she could enjoy his full attention only by asking to have something explained, even if for the nth. time.
He smiled and thought of the girls he used to talk with, not at, and of how little breath they had for talking now in the world where no one drew an unobstructed breath.
It had begun with the accidental discovery in a routine laboratory analysis of a new element in the air, an inert gas which the great paleolinguist Larkish had named agnoton, the Unknown Thing, after the pattern of the similar nicknames given to others: neon, the New Thing; xenon, the Strange Thing.
It had continued (the explanation ran off so automatically that his mind was free to range from the next line of the epic to the interesting question of whether the presence of ear lobes would damage the symmetry of Lavra’s perfect face), it had continued with the itching and sneezing, the coughing and wheezing, with the increase of the percentage of agnoton in the atmosphere, promptly passing any other inert gas, even argon, and soon rivaling oxygen itself.
And it had culminated (no, the lines were cleaner without lobes), on that day when only the three of them were here in this retreat, with the discovery that the human race was allergic to agnoton.
Now allergies had been conquered for a decade of generations. Their cure, even their palliation, had been forgotten. And mankind coughed and sneezed and itched—and died. For while the allergies of the ancient past produced only agonies to make the patient long for death, agnoton brought on racking and incessant spasms of coughing and sneezing which no heart could long withstand.
“So if you leave this shelter, my dear,” Vyrko concluded, “you too will fight for every breath and twist your body in torment until your heart decides that it is all a little too much trouble. Here we are safe, because your father’s eczema was the only known case of allergy in centuries—and was traced to the inert gases. Here is the only air-conditioning in the world that excludes the inert gases—and with them agnoton. And here—”
Lavra leaned forward, a smile and a red fleck of apple skin on her lips, the apples of her breasts touching Vyrko’s shoulders. This too was part of the gambit.
Usually it was merely declined. (Tyrsa, who sang well and talked better; whose plain face and beautiful throat were alike racked by agnoton . . .) This time it was interrupted.
Kirth-Labbery himself had come in unnoticed. His old voice was thin with weariness, sharp with impatience. “And here we are! Safe in perpetuity, with our air-conditioning, our energy plant, our hydroponics! Safe in perpetual siege, besieged by an inert gas!”
Vyrko grinned. “Undignified, isn’t it?”
Kirth-Labbery managed to laugh at himself. “Damn your secretarial hide, Vyrko. I love you like a son, but if I had one man who knew a meson from a metazoon to help me in the laboratory—”
“You’ll find something, Father,” Lavra said vaguely.
Her father regarded her with an odd seriousness. “Lavra,” he said, “your beauty is the greatest thing that I have wrought—with a certain assistance, I’ll
