- Chapter 7

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PULLING THROUGH
ForDave Shumway . . . who has pulled me through more than once. 
 

 

 
I. Doomsday 
I found her thirty miles north of Oakland at Sears Point—the international raceway, to be exact, where headstrong car freaks of all sexes liked to hang out before the war. She looked smaller than eighteen. Also older. I had no trouble recognizing her from mug shots and, from the bail bondsman, glossies from her days as a teen model. But the glossies were before she'd gone pro in the worst sense, the sense that brought me into it. My name's Harve Rackham; I was a bounty hunter.
My first problem was isolating her from the quiet machos who ran Sears Point on autumn weekdays, teaching chauffeurs evasive driving and making a show of unconcern to the pit popsies—or whatever they called wistful jailbait in those days. I hadn't kept up on pit jargon since my weight climbed into the two-fifty range and I let my competition license lapse. You can't give away sixty pounds to other drivers when you drive the little cars. My Lotus Cellular wasn't tiny, but it weighed next to nothing; just the thing to drive when some bail jumper tried to sideswipe you, because the air-cushion fans could literally jump you over the big bad Buicks. And the plastic chassis cells in an off-road Lotus would absorb a handgun slug as—but I was talking about the girl. Like most sportscar nuts, she could be hypnotized by certain phrases: my Ferrari, my Lotus, my classic DeLorean; but you had to be ready to put up or shut up.
The girl had a very direct way about her, and in five minutes while I watched she was left standing at the Armco pit barrier twice by guys who didn't need whatever she was offering. She was making it easy for me.
Instead of sidling up to her—ever see anybody six foot two sidle? Ridiculous . . . I waved her back, adopting a proprietary air. "These are private practice sessions, miss. And you're in a bad spot; if one of these four-door Bimmers kisses the Armco barrier it'll be spitting hunks of mag all down the pit apron." It wasn't likely, but it sounded good.
Her voice was a surprise, as sunny blonde as her Mediterranean features were dark. "I wasn't thinking," she said, "thanks. Uh—d'you know if any of those big limos," she paused, drowned out as a long BMW limousine howled around the last turn and then accelerated up the straight with a muted thrummm, "will be going home today or tomorrow?"
"A couple," I said, just as if I had the foggiest idea. "Why?"
I could see what's it to you in her sultry, too-experienced young face, but she erased it after a moment's thought. "I've never copped a ride in fifty thousand bucks' worth of limo," she said with a shrug.
By God, but she had cute ideas! Chauffeurs trained in the limos they drove from Denver or L. A., and the evasive training took a week. So an enterprising wench on the run might cop a ride out of the Bay Area without showing her lush tush at bus depots or freeway on-ramps, where some plainclothesman might recognize her. And she could pay off in the oldest coin of all.
A big Jag sedan sailed past, its Pirellis squalling. Its plate prefixes told me it was from L.A.; in my business you memorized that kind of trivia for the times when it might not be trivial. "He'll be heading for Pasadena," I said into the ensuing quiet—it might even be true—"and I expect I'll beat him there by two hours in my Cellular."
Quick, suspicious: "You're taking a Lotus to Pasadena?"
"Nope. To Palm Springs," I lied, and sighed a rich man's self-indulgent sigh. "A limo's okay, but they always put me to sleep." I pulled my Frisbee-size pocket watch out, though I already knew the time. A wrist chrono hangs up on clothing sometimes, and my ancient eighteen-jewel Hamilton was rugged as hell. It also carried the same false hint of money as a Rolex. I flipped the Hamilton's protective cover up, studied the dial, sighed again, put the thing away. "Enjoy your trip," I said and turned away.
For an instant I thought she had spurned the bait. Then, "I don't believe it," she said to my back.
I turned my head. "Shall I hover and wave?"
She hurried to catch up. "You just don't look like a man who drives superlight cars," she said brightly. "A Lotus Cellular? Can it really outrun the Porsches?"
"Outjump, yes. Outrun? No," I said truthfully. Now we approached the glass-walled anterooms where staff members made their low-key pitches to interested execs.
She was so intent on peering through the glass to spot my car in the parking lot, she didn't notice much else. Two young men stood in the anteroom in much-laundered driving coveralls labeled "Mitch" and "Jerry." I'd never seen either of them before. "See you next time, Jer," I rumbled on my way out, for the girl's benefit. Every little scam helps.
When she saw my car, her suspicion fled. I slid the half-door aside, shoehorned my gut in with me. She ran her hand along the sand-tinted door sill opposite. "Feels rubbery," she said.
"Stealth coating. Plays hell with fuzz radar," I said, winked, fired up the engine, and made an unnecessary check of the system's digitals.
She had to talk louder, so she did. "My name's Kathy." I knew it was Kate Gallo. "You really going to Palm Springs? Right now?"
One good lie deserves another. "Right now," I said, and let the hover fans burp a puff of dust from beneath the Cellular's skirts.
"Aren't you even going to ask me if I want a ride?"
"Nope. Haven't time for you to collect luggage. And young girls are trouble." I blipped the engine.
She held up her shoulder bag, the kind that you could swing a cat in; the kind that alerts shopkeepers. "I travel light. And I'm free and twenty-one." She licked her lips, forced a desperate smile: "And I can be very friendly."
"I'll settle for repartee that keeps me awake on Interstate Five," I replied and waved her in as if already regretting my bigheartedness.
She piled in with a goodly flash of leg; levered her torso safety cushion into place as I backed in wheel-mode onto macadam. No sense in leaving a ground-effects dust pall behind. Then I eased onto the highway, ran the Lotus up through her gears manually and cut in the fans again for that lovely up-and-over sensation, nosing upward until we could have soared over anything but a big semi rig, before I settled us down again to a legal pace on wheels. All to give Kathy-Kate a wee thrill. It was the least I could do; she didn't know I'd locked her torso restraint. She couldn't get out if she wanted to, and that would've given her something entirely different. A wiwi thrill.
So far it had been so easy I was ashamed of myself. I hadn't needed cuffs on her. She didn't even know my name, or that she was headed for the Oakland jug—and she wasn't, but I didn't know that, of course. I got my first inkling of it as we passed the new bridge that led to Mare Island Shipyard.
Mare Island wasn't just fenced off: it boasted two men in civvies carrying Ingrams with the tubular stocks extended and thirty-round magazines. No suppressors. Those guys commanded real respect; not even an armored Mercedes could get past them, much less fat Harve with his puddle-jumping Lotus. But I intended to pass them by anyhow, over the Carquinez bridge and down to Oakland before rush hour with my unsuspecting "suspect."
So much for my intentions. Carquinez bridge was closed to southerly traffic—and patrolled. I didn't understand until, diverted toward the Martinez bridge some miles away, I noted the wall-to-wall traffic heading north from the Oakland area. I pulled up near a uniformed Vallejo officer who was directing traffic. I bawled, "What's the trouble over Carquinez?"
He looked at me as though I were an idiot. "You must be kidding," he called, but saw from my expression that I wasn't. "You got a radio in that thing?" I nodded. "Use it. And if you're thinking of heading south, think again," he shouted, and jumped at the dull gong of a minor collision behind him.
I punched the radio on and exchanged shrugs with the girl. In my rearview I could see the officer waving the fender-benders aside with no effort to ascertain injuries or to take videotapes. It was a bad intersection, already littered with glass and fluids from other recent collisions. Evidently the officer had special orders to keep the roadway clear at all costs.
"Okay," I said to myself as much as to the girl, "we'll detour east to Martinez," and squirted the Lotus ahead at a speed that should've put a black-and-white on my tail.
But long before I reached the Martinez bridge, the radio had told me why that was wishful thinking. A nervous announcer was saying, ". . . at the request of the White House, to participate in the Emergency Broadcast System. During this emergency most stations will remain on the air, broadcasting news and official information to the public in assigned areas. This is Station KCBS, San Francisco; we will remain on the air to serve the San Francisco County area. If you are not in this area, you should tune to other stations until you hear one broadcasting news and information in your area.
"You are listening to the Emergency Broadcast System serving the San Francisco County area. Do not use your telephone. The telephone lines should be kept open for emergency use. The Emergency Broadcast System has been activated—" Flick. The girl beat me to it, seeking another station.
". . . is Station KABL, Oakland. This station will broadcast news, official information and instruction for the Alameda County area—" Flick. This time I made the change.
I got KWUN, a Concord station. The girl couldn't have known it, but Concord was within ten miles of my place and by now I had no other goal but that fenced five-acre plot of mine on the backside of Mount Diablo. The announcer seemed disbelieving of his own news. "Radio Damascus claims that the Syrian attack on elements of the US Sixth Fleet was a legitimate response to violations of Syria's air space by our carrier-based aircraft. In Washington the Secretary of Defense defended the policy of hot pursuit against the bases from which Soviet-built Syrian fighter-bombers sank the US tender Bloomsbury about fifty miles west of Beirut early this morning. There has been no official response from Washington to the Syrian claim that the supercarrier Nimitz lies capsized in the Mediterranean after a nuclear near-miss by a Syrian cruise missile—"
"Oh shit," the girl and I said simultaneously.
 
We soon learned that most stations were simply repeating the prefabricated EBS messages we'd heard earlier, awaiting an official White House announcement. Little KWUN soon fell back on the same script as the others, but it had already told me enough. Syria's cruise birds were Soviet-made; her nukes probably Libyan. It no longer mattered whether the Soviets had known that Syria could screw nuclear tips onto those weapons. Far more important was the battle raging between our Sixth Fleet and the fast Soviet hoverships we had engaged as they poured from the Black Sea into the Aegean. I figured the Nimitz for a supercasualty, and I was right; once the Navy lost that big vulnerable beauty they'd be shooting at everything that moved. Our media weren't telling us, yet, that things were moving toward West Germany, too, on clanking caterpillar treads.
We found the Martinez bridge blocked, its southbound lanes choked with the solid stream of northbound traffic. Cursing, I took the road past the old Benicia historical monument because I knew it led to the water. "I hope you can swim, Kate," I called over the wail of the engine, "in case we get a malf halfway across Suisun Bay."
"Stop this thing," she screamed. I did. "We'd never make Palm Springs in traffic like this," she said, her dark eyes very round and smokily Sicilian. "And why did you call me Kate?"
"I know all my property," I said. "Legally, Kate Gallo, you are my temporary chattel property by California law. I can slap you around if I need to, or put you in handcuffs and gag you."
Her eyes became almost circular. "Bounty hunter," she accused.
"You got it, and it's got you. But I'm not taking you back to Oakland now, Kate. I'm heading for my home in Contra Costa County, which has a nice deep basement and all of Mount Diablo to protect us against whatever ails the Bay Area." She was struggling against her torso restraint. "Are you listening?"
In answer she turned toward me with claws flashing; raked my jacket sleeve in lightning swipes that almost drew blood through the Dacron; shifted her aim toward my face. It was not a move calculated to bring out my gentlemanly instincts.
I cuffed her with my gloved hand, lightly, twice—just enough to make her draw back to protect those lovely strong cheekbones. "You can go," I said, and repeated it as she gazed at me through defensive hands. I triggered the release on the torso restraint and, while she surged up from the seat, I added, "While you lie dying, remember I gave you a chance."
She hadn't panicked because she was still thinking ahead. She paused astraddle the door sill. "A Berkeley whizkid told me once that the only smart way out of Oakland, in an evacuation, was north along the coast. I'll make it."
"So will a million others." I jerked my head back toward the clogged arterials. "Did he also mention that you might starve? Did he mention the very few people there who might be willing to share food and drinkable water? I may take chances, Kate, but I haven't been stupid."
While she stood there undecided, for all I knew, heavyweight Soviet rockets might've been thundering up from Semipalatinsk—and from Nevada, for that matter. I jazzed the engine. "I asked if you can swim, Kate."
"Damn right," she shot back, and twinkletoed back into my Lotus. "You just make sure I don't have to haul your fat ass ashore."
And that was how I chose to spend Doomsday with a beautiful felon.
 
If I'd had a true unfettered choice, I'd have chosen someone other than Kate Gallo for a nuclear survival companion. And I probably would've chosen worse; Kate was no survivalist, but a born survivor—as I learned. As for Doomsday: you can't split a planet with a few gigatons of explosive, but you can sure doom a lot of its inhabitants.
I muttered something to that effect while keeping the Lotus above small, languid whitecaps in Suisun Bay. Kate Gallo stayed scrunched down, scanning the October sky as if by sheer willpower she could keep it clear of hostile weapons. Halfway across the two-mile stretch of water she showed optimistic colors. "So what do you do with me if this turns out to be a false alarm?"
"Hadn't thought about it," I said, shouting to compete with the fan noises. "Let you give yourself up, maybe, if you can convince me you're through making dumb decisions. But don't count on—oh, Jeez-us," I finished, glancing to my left toward the soaring bridge structure a mile distant.
Near the bridge center, vaulting the rail of concrete and steel, a tiny oblong of four-door sedan climbed aloft, etched on a hard sapphire sky, propelled from behind by a determined eighteen-wheeler. Shards of concrete and metal sparkled. A minuscule fire-bloom trailed the sedan as it cartwheeled nearly two hundred feet to the water. When the big rig jackknifed, its trailer found the same hole in the rail and (okay, admit it, Rackham) I had the satisfaction of seeing the bully ooze through the gap and begin a one-and-a-half pike into the bay. The rig moved so slowly that I saw its driver, ant-size from my view, leap to the safety of the bridge. However small his chances, they were better than those of anybody a few miles behind him in Oakland.
I guessed that the bridge incident was being multiplied by drivers made mindless by terror from San Jose to Norfolk. We couldn't hear the truck caterwaul past the railing, nor even its splash, and our distance somehow insulated us. In minutes we'd be nosing into the reality of waterfront chaos in Martinez.
The dashboard map display reminded me we'd have to cross one major arterial, then skirt the Concord NavWep station en route to the winding roads near my place. With traffic like we were seeing, those odds had no appeal whatever. Our chances would be better with the bay itself as our conduit—but not if I kept the Lotus's engine near redline for much longer. "Don't worry if you feel water," I called to Kate Gallo, and eased back on the pedal while turning the wheel.
The worry was all mine. I passed under the highway bridge heading up the bay, fully aware that an errant wave could toss a gallon of water into the fan intakes and send us skating like a flat rock; a rock that would disintegrate before it sank, at the speed we were crossing. A dozen big powerboats and twice that many smaller ones crisscrossed the bay, creating a nightmarish chop that slapped our bottom. Twice I heard strangled surges as bits of spray entered the fan intakes. I'd destroyed an off-road Porsche that way once, and my sphincter didn't unpucker until we droned up the mouth of the San Joaquin River.
I took the first boat ramp that wasn't clogged, which was on the outskirts of tatty little Pittsburg, and ignored the outraged yells of folks who were trying to clog it as the Lotus wheels found purchase. We fled from the waterfront, eastward through town, between rows of Pittsburg's down-at-the-heel date palms that, like the tall, rawboned strippers in Vallejo, promised a lot but never put out much.
Kate called to me between gear changes: "Why is the traffic so light here?"
"Just guessing," I replied, "but Pittsburg and Antioch have been small towns so long, they don't realize how near they are to ground zero." I still don't know if that's the right answer. I just know a hell of a lot of nice folks died thinking a nuclear strike was a respecter of city limits.
At the outskirts of Antioch, with the brush-dotted hump of Mount Diablo looming nearly a mile high ahead of us, I turned south and passed wrecks at several intersections before turning onto Lone Tree Way. The power lines hadn't yet fallen across this broad boulevard, but some poor bastard's old highwing Luscombe was hung up like a bat on a clothesline between two highline towers, smoking and sparking as it dribbled molten aluminum ninety feet to the dry grass below. To wrench Kate's attention from the grisly clinkers that jerked in the cockpit, I pointed ahead. "Just past the airport we hit Deer Valley Road. No more towns now." I pulled the phone from under the dash, coded a number, gave the handset to Kate. "I need both hands; this road becomes a gymkhana up ahead. See if you can get through."
"We're not supposed to use the phone," she said. "Your wife?"
"My sister Sharon, in a San Jose suburb. If I'm any judge, she and Ernie and the kids'll be at my place before we are." Which just goes to show I'm a lousy judge.
 
Relaxing too soon can be suicide. In the years since the '81 depression, when I lucked into some cash and bought my country place, I'd driven the Deer Valley-Marsh Creek route a thousand times—before this always enjoying the extravagant curlicues of two-lane blacktop winding between slopes so steep they hid the major bulk of Mount Diablo. I hadn't met a single car since turning onto the creek road; I knew every ripple on the road shoulder; and I was so near home that I'd begun to worry about Shar, taking my own safety for granted. That was when the old black Lincoln slewed around a blind bend, fishtailing toward us.
My midbrain made its subconscious guess. If we were lucky, the Continental would regain enough traction to lurch back so that we could pass on the shoulder.
We weren't lucky. Neither was he. This was no gimmicked limo with tuned shocks and suspension but your truly classic two-ton turd, and it began to spin at us just past the bend. But a mass that size does everything in slow motion; by the time its overlong rump swung around, my hand was on the fan lever.
The trick to a Cellular's jackrabbit leap is in slapping the gear selector to neutral a split second before you engage the fans, so that all the engine's torque is available to energize those big air impellers inside the body shell. It doesn't halt your forward motion; in fact, removing your tires from macadam, it relinquishes all braking and steering control to the fan vents, so you can't obtain any strong side forces. With fans moaning, we soared over the trunk of the Lincoln by a two-foot margin, only to sideswipe the branches of a pinoak that showered us with twigs as my airborne Lotus tilted and veered back over the road. I kept my foot off the brake, let the fan vents remedy the tilt, chopped back on the impellers and didn't engage third gear until I felt the tires touch the road. After that I kept busy getting through the bend and decided to slow down a bit.
"Aren't we going to stop?" Kate was white-faced, her neck craned backward.
I hadn't risked a backward glance. "What for?"
"He rolled and hit a big sycamore next to the creek!"
I slowed while thinking it over, then let my biases show and pressed on. "If he was driving that kind of fat-cat barge with that kind of disregard," I growled, "the hell with him."
She started to reply, then gave me a judgmental headshake and tried the phone again. But communication lines, like other traffic, had become overloaded to the point of paralysis. When I ducked off the macadam onto the gravel access road to my place, the girl was still trying Shar's number fruitlessly.
I remoted the gate in the cyclone fence surrounding my place as we approached and caught sight of my friend Spot, whose ears could always discriminate between the sounds of my Lotus and any other machine. Kate studied the sign on the eight-foot fence, one of several around my five-acre spread that proclaimed:
 
CHEETAH ON PATROL
 
and she gave me a smirk as the gate swung shut behind us. "You don't expect anyone to believe that," she chided.
I drove slowly toward the garage, a partly converted smithy behind the house, and smirked right back. "Just so long as he believes it," I said, and jerked my thumb toward her door sill.
Kate's brow furrowed and then she turned and stared full into the dappled half-feline face of Spot, whose lanky stride kept his blunt muzzle almost even with hers. Her whole bod stiffened. Then she faced straight ahead, swallowed convulsively, and slid far down into her seat. Her knuckles on the torso restraint were bone-white, but, tough little bimbo that she was, Kate never whimpered.
I drove into the garage and killed the engine and delivered a long sigh, then traded obligatory ear sniffs with Spot while my head was still level with his. His yellow eyes kept straying to my passenger, more a question than a warning; I rarely brought nonfamily guests to my place. "Company, Spot," I said, and reached over to scratch Kate behind the ear.
She sat rigid. "Does that mean I'm one of your pets, too?"
"It means you're his peer; he'll let you take the first swipe. But Spot's no pet; he's my friend and a damn good watchcat. My Captive Breeding Permit from the Department of the Interior says I own him—but nobody's told him that."
"So how do I behave? No sudden moves?" I caught the tremor in her voice.
"Neither of us could possibly make a move he'd consider sudden," I said, and proved it by pushing my door aside abruptly. Spot, of course, pulled back untouched as I grunted my way out of the Lotus and waved for Kate to do the same.
But: "Don't leopards turn against people sometimes?"
"I wouldn't know. Spot isn't a leopard; he's a male cheetah in his prime and he stays healthy on farina mix and horsemeat. He's the nearest thing to a link between cats and dogs; his claws aren't fully retractile and he wasn't born with the usual feline hunting instincts. Even has coarse hair like a dog, as you'll find out when you pat him."
"Fat chance." At least she was getting out of the car.
"Or you can panic and run wild and wave your arms and scream," I said, "and he'll frisk circles around you and laugh at the funny lady. Come on, I need to check my incoming messages," I added, and let them both follow me to the tunnel while she stared at my house.
My white clapboard two-story house, I told her, was a basket case when I bought it. I reroofed it, then found myself shopping for antique wallpaper patterns and reflectors for kerosene lamps, and ended with an outlay of fifty thou and two hundred gallons of sweat only when the house was furnished à la 1910 from the foundation up. The basement and part of the old smithy were something else again: you can't maintain a Cellular, or an automated cheetah feeder, or a bounty hunter's hardware, amid dust and mildew.
I led Kate past gray shreds of wooden doors that led to my root cellar. The doors lay agape on an earth mound, flanking the dark stairs fifty feet from my back door. "Let there be light," I said on the stairs, and there was light. I could've said "Keep it dark," and the tunnel lights would've come on anyway. It was my voiceprint, and Shar's and Ern's, that the system reacted to. It didn't recognize Spot's sound effects. For all his wolfen ways, Spot had a purr like God's stomach rumbling. Plus a dozen other calls, from a tabby's meow to yips and even a ludicrous birdy chirp.
Kate Gallo negotiated the turn behind me. "Curiouser and curiouser, cried Alice," she gibed. "I can't decide whether you're behind the times or ahead of 'em, Mr. Rackham."
It was my turn to register surprise, and I stopped. So did she. "You didn't lift my wallet, so how'd you know my name?"
"You told me."
I merely shook my head, very slowly. Smiling.
"Okay, if your ego needs stroking: most people on the scam in the Bay Area know about you. You're seven feet tall and weigh four hundred pounds and leap tall buildings, et cetera, and inside that rough exterior beats a heart of pure granite. You've got no friends, no family, no home, and anybody who tries to negotiate with you had better do it with silver bullets. I suspect you invented some of that crap yourself. Satisfied?"
"Eminently," I said and laughed. "So why didn't you peel off when you first saw me?"
"Lots of fa—uh, heavyset men around," she amended, glancing at my backlit paneling. "Let's just say I'm stupid."
"Not me. You've suckered too many bright solid citizens into the badger game for me to make that mistake, Kate." She just grinned an impudent grin and, for good measure, deliberately laid her hand on Spot's patient head. I pressed on: "I know your family has money. Why'd you do it?"
"Because of my family—and because I damn well like making men squirm. If you knew my mother you wouldn't have to ask."
I nodded. Raised in a strict household where females were expected to keep the Sabbath holy, the pasta tender, and the men on pedestals, Kate Gallo had learned too much about the rest of the world; had cast aside her illusions and her virginity before reflecting that both had their good points; had decided she would make the system pay. And men ran the system, so-o-o. . . . "Ever meet a male who didn't undervalue your gender?" I asked.
"A few."
"Well, you've just met another one. Two, if you count him," I said, nodding at Spot. Who just sat there with his tongue showing in a doggy leer. "Time's awasting, Kate; and quit laughing, you skinny sonofabitch," I said to Spot.
 
Long before I'd asked Ern McKay to critique my ideas on "the place"—we seldom called my fenced homestead anything else. With twenty years at NASA's Ames wind tunnel in the south Bay Area, master modeler Ernest McKay was what the Navy called a mustang engineer; no degree, but bagsful of expertise. Ern had taught me about parsimony, i.e., keeping it simple. Why require two codes for my tunnel lights and basement door lock when a unique voiceprint was the key to both functions? It was my idea to hang the steel-faced door into my underground office so that gravity swung it open, and Ern's dictum to avoid an automatic door closer. That would've required a selenium cell, pressure plate, or capacitance switch—all fallible—when all I needed, quoth ol' Ern, was a handle. While helping me convert a basement into a livable modern apartment and office, Ern had briefed me on a lot of NASA's design philosophy.
The result was a subterranean Bauhaus living area without many partitions, where everything worked with a minimum of bells and whistles—and when something didn't work, like a clogged drain, it was easy to get at. You can carp all you like about exposed, color-coded conduits, but I liked knowing which plastic pipes were air vents and which one led from my basement john to my septic tank down the hill. You guess which was painted a rich brown.
Kate Gallo stepped onto the linolamat of my office and gawked while I heaved the door shut. "Up those stairs"—I pointed to the freestanding steel steps that melded into old-fashioned wooden stairs halfway up—"is the kitchen, and just off the kitchen is a screen porch. Grab the antique galvanized tub off the porch wall and all the pans in the kitchen, bring 'em down here to the john, and fill 'em with water."
I strode around the apartment divider, a rough masonry interior wall that served as a central crossbeam under the floor above, grabbed my remotable comm system handset from my computer carrel, and headed for the john while querying for incoming messages. In the back of my head was envy for Kate, who was evidently slender enough that she didn't make those top stairs squeak on her way upstairs.
The first message was from a bail bondsman, who assured me positively that Kate Gallo had run to Sacramento. I muttered an anatomical instruction for him under my breath while readying my oversize bathtub for filling; started back to my office as the second message pinged; stopped dead as I saw why Signorina Katerina hadn't made squeaky music on my stairs. She was still standing on my linolamat, arms crossed in defiance. We traded hard stares as the message began, and Spot's ears twitched in recognition of the voice from my speaker.
"We're on the way, Harve, at—uh, eleven fifteen or so. Ernie and Cammie are putting bikes in the vanwagon and Lance is clearing out the freezer. I dumped our medicines and toilet things into a box and I'm checking off everything, and we'll take the Livermore route to avoid freewayitis. In case you haven't heard, Ernie says tell you somebody at Ames got word from Satellite Test Center at Lockheed: they're monitoring evacuation out of Leningrad and Moscow . . ."
Then we caught part of a McKay tradition in the background, young Lance throwing one of his patented tantrums. " . . . but he's not taking mine and he knows I gotta have it, he can fix it, I know it, Iknowitiknowit—" and then a slam of something. I knew it wasn't the impact of Shar's palm on Lance's butt; that was beyond reasonable hope.
My sis again: "Poor Lance, his bike is broken so he's been using Cammie's in spite of everything we've—well, Ernie isn't packing it so of course the child is broken up," she went on quickly, ending with a breezy, "Well, we'll cope. We always do. Oh! You said to be specific, so: we're taking Route Six-Eighty toward Livermore, then the old Morgan Road to your place. Don't worry, bubba, we should be at your place by three pee-em unless we have to fire the second-stage. Coming, hon," she called to someone, and then the line went dead.
"Poor Lance," I snarled, tossing my handset control and catching it instead of hurling it against a wall. "Little bastard beats the bejeezus out of his bike, too lazy to fix it, and now that he realizes why Ern nagged him to keep it in shape it's too late, so he takes his frustration out on everybody else. And why the fuck aren't you collecting water containers," I shot at Kate.
"Because the fuck," she said, sweetly enunciating it to extract its maximum gross-out potential, "I didn't relish being ordered around like a servant. What was all that stuff in the garage about peers, mister?"
I took two long breaths; stared at my reproduction of Bierstadt's Rocky Mountains near the stairwell for solace. "I believe I said you're Spot's peer, Kate. Not a pet but a working part. He keeps the place free of swagmen and rabbits, and if he didn't, he wouldn't have any place here. I'll be as democratic as I can—which means not very, when it's my place and I know the drill and you don't, and since there has to be a leader it is going to be the one who knows what must be done.
"That was my sister Shar, on tape. They're two hours late and I don't like wondering why, and if you think I'm stuck with you here, you should know that you are exactly one more smart-ass refusal away from getting tossed over my cyclone fence." My one office window gave me a view of Mount Diablo and, reluctantly, I cranked its wire-reinforced outer panels closed. I hated the thought of shoveling dirt against those panels, since it would block off the only natural light into my basement. But that was part of the original drill we'd worked out long ago, after Shar inexplicably signed up for an urban survival course at a community college.
I went back to the john and shut off the water, painfully aware that I'd given the girl a galling choice; also aware that I meant every word. When I glanced at her again she had aged astonishingly, arms hanging loosely, no longer the pert rebel—maybe ever again. "All right," she choked, and went up the stairs. "You know I don't have any choice."
Following her, I said, "Neither do I. I hope you can be part of the solution, Kate—and I can't afford you as part of my problem. Cheer up, kid, maybe this is all just—"
"Please," she said, looking around her at my turn-of-the-century kitchen, "just leave me alone. Please?" Then, spotting the squat bulk of my cast-iron wood stove, she allowed a piece of a chuckle to escape as she passed it. "Boy, you are really weird—don't do that," she added suddenly.
I removed the hand I'd put on her shoulder, intending to convey something—hope, camaraderie, understanding; hell, I don't know what—but obviously I didn't understand her. "Right," I mumbled, and sloped outside to get a shovel. Swinging up in a long arc from Travis AFB was one of our new heavies under rocket boost. I heard several more while digging, and while I didn't stop to watch them, I wondered what they were up to. I don't wonder anymore.
Working up a fast sweat, I shoveled a ramp of turf against my office window until it almost matched the slope of the earthen ramp that surrounded the house about to the level of the first floor. I tried not to tally the minutes by which Shar and Ern and the kids were overdue. The tally came unbidden, since it was nearly five pee-em, two hours past Shar's estimate. Muted thunks and sloshes reached me as Kate filled my kitchenware with water. I was ruminating along the lines of, Even if this false alarm costs a thousand lives, it may eventually save fifty million, when a vast white light filled the sky, more pitiless than any summer noon, and did not fade for many seconds.
 
In my hurry, I hadn't followed my own drill; hadn't kept two radios tuned to different stations; and so I didn't hear the President's brief, self-serving spiel that called for crisis relocation and, by implication, admitted that we could expect a "limited" nuclear response to the tactical weapons we were unleashing on the wave of Soviet tanks that had lashed across the border into West Germany. "Crisis relocation" was an old weasel phrase for "evacuation"; our Office of Technology Assessment and thinktanks like the Hudson Institute had solemnly agreed that Americans would have between twenty-four and seventy-two hours of warning before any crisis developed into a nuclear exchange.
Actually, from the moment our Navy engaged Russkis in the Aegean until the first wave of nuke-tipped MIRVs streaked up from Soviet hard sites, we'd had about fifteen hours. It might've been halfway adequate if we'd planned for it as Soviet-bloc countries had done—or even as one solitary local government had done in Lane County, Oregon.
Everybody joked about the jog-crazy, mist-maddened tokers around the University of Oregon in Eugene, so the media had its fun upon learning that city and county officials there were serious about evac—I mean, crisis relocation. Some poly sci professor, in a lecture about legal diversion of funds, pointed out that most federal funding for crisis relocation was turned over to emergency-services groups in sheriffs' departments. And that those funds—all over the country, not just in Oregon—were being diverted by perfectly legal means to other uses. The overall plan for a quarter-million people in the Eugene area was orderly movement to the touristy strip along the coast.
Then an undergrad checked out the routes and nervously reported that the wildest optimist wouldn't believe that many people could drive out of firestorm range in two days' time through a bottleneck consisting of a solitary two-lane highway and a pair of unimproved hold-your-breath gravel roads. County maps showed several more old roads. They hadn't existed for thirty years.
Firestorm in Eugene bloody Orygun? A strong possibility, since the Southern Pacific's main switching yards in the coastal Northwest sprawled out along the little city's outskirts. No prime target, certainly, but all too likely as a secondary or tertiary strike victim. In a county commission meeting, some citizen asked, Why worry? We'll just get on the capacious Interstate 5 freeway and drive south.
The hell you will, replied a state patrol official. We have orders to keep that corridor clear for special traffic running south from Portland and the state capital. There'll be riot guns at the barricades; sorry 'bout that, but Eugeneans were scheduled to the coast and if they didn't like that, they could stay home and watch the firestorm from inside it, har har.
When local politicos realized how many feisty folks in the Eugene-Springfield area were clamoring for a solution, one of them hit on a rationale that couldn't be faulted. Eugene could be a target because the railroad had such tremendous load-carrying capacity, right?
Right. And SP's rolling stock, flatcars for milled lumber and boxcars slated for Portland and Seattle, often sat waiting on sidings all over the place, right?
Right. And the SP had a branch railway straight to the coast and a small yard for turnarounds only two hours away by slow freight. A hastily assembled train could haul fifty thousand people and all the survival gear each could lift from Eugene in a single trip, then return for more.
And that was right, too. With public subscriptions helping to fund their studies, SP troubleshooters found that they could make up such a train in about twelve hours. They even tried it once, billed as an outing for subscribers who'd paid SP to do the groundwork, and though two drunks were injured falling off a flatcar, it made a lighthearted tag end to the eleven o'clock news across the nation. That had been two years ago.
Eugene's solitary preparations flashed through my head as, groveling flat on my belly, shouting into the eerie silence and seemingly endless flashbulb glare, I protected my eyes and called to Kate to do the same. I'd always thought an enemy would choose, as ground zero, the Alameda naval facility to my west. Ern had said STC, the satellite control nexus south of me in Sunnyvale, would be the spot. Occasional news pieces had suggested Travis AFB, a reactivated base twenty-five miles north of me; or Hamilton AFB, thirty-five miles northeast.
And we were all absolutely correct. The ghastly efficiency of a MIRV lay in each big missile's handful of warheads, and each warhead could be aimed at a different target. Travis disappeared in a ground burst, perhaps to take out our bombers and deep-stored nukes there. That was the deadly flower that blossomed first in hellish silence over the hills north of my place. The others were only moments behind.
When the light through my eyelids dwindled to something like normal afternoon brightness, I heaved myself up and pounded back into the house. On my way downstairs I saw my dining room wallpaper reflect another actinic dazzle from the windows, coming from the low airburst over Hamilton to our west. The fluorescents in my office below seemed pale for a moment. "Come on," I called, unable to find Kate. "Our best protection is in the tunnel!"
She rolled from beneath my desk; yelped, "Don't do that," as Spot darted ahead of her while she was darting ahead of me. I shut the big door, slapping the light plate to keep the tunnel lit, and sat down on the tough yielding linolamat.
"Spot, come," I said as his languid trot carried him toward the root cellar entrance. Another burst of energy lit the root cellar from the distant entrance, making Spot wheel back quickly.
"That's three," I said. But I was wrong, having missed the light show of Alameda's airburst. We were seeing cloud reflections of the ground-pounder that took out Sunnyvale, Palo Alto, and much of San Jose.
In a very small voice Kate said, "The air is bad in here," and slumped against the wall. Spot nuzzled her ear as I got down on one knee and propped her into a sitting position.
Her breath was quick and shallow, pulse racing but strong, and Spot wasn't sneezing or showing any of the discomfort he shows in foul air. She wasn't shocky cold either, and suddenly I realized she'd been hyperventilating—not the deliberate deep whiffs of a free diver but the slow oxygen starvation you could experience when quiet panic and rigid self-control made a battleground of your hindbrain. "Head between your knees, Kate," I murmured to her trembles. "Try breathing slowly; all the way out, then all the way in."
At that moment a sharp rumble whacked the house and my ears, not very hard. But a softer rumble continued for what seemed a full minute; the Travis shock wave and its retinue of thunders. Spot's white-tipped tail flicked, his ears at half-mast. He showed his teeth in a hiss at the doorjamb, which was buzzing in sympathy with a vibration that shook the earth remorselessly.
When the second shock came it hit sharply, with a clatter of my fine Bavarian china as obbligato upstairs.
The third jolt hit five seconds later, the one from Alameda. A freak shock front raced through Concord, making lethal Frisbees of every glass pane and marble false-front in town. My western windows blew in and, with a pistol's report, one of my sturdy old roof beams ended nearly a century of usefulness. My ears popped with a faint pressure change; popped again. I could hear bricks falling from my chimney onto the roof, sliding off, but couldn't at first identify the snap-crack that came more and more rapidly until it became a guttural rising groan. It had to be my handsome old water tower, though, because that was what toppled near my kitchen, splintering porch stairs as it struck.
My electric pump was probably whining furiously to refill it, but I couldn't shut it off right then, thanks. The tank, strap-bound like a wine cask, had held several hundred gallons of water twenty feet in the air for gravity flow—probably the only overloaded structure on my place.
Well, it was overloaded no longer. One of Ern's old NASA bromides was that highly stressed structures have a way of unstressing themselves for you—but wouldn't you really rather do it yourself?
The last shock wave, from Sunnyvale near San Jose, was almost negligible for us in the lee of Mount Diablo. I tried to recall the crucial time sequences: the initial long flash that distributed heat and hard radiation at the speed of light and could have temporarily flash-blinded me if I'd had a line-of-sight view of the initial moment; the shock waves, one through the ground and a slower one through air that pulverized concrete near ground zero; a momentary underpressure a moment later near the blast that could suck lungs or houses apart: another machwave that could flatten a forest or a skyscraper. Fires and cave-ins were my most likely failure modes during those first long moments. If we came through all that alive, then it was time to worry about the fallout that could destroy live tissue through a brick wall.
Yet Shar's classroom work had taught us something vital, something most of the doomsday books ignored: if you were twenty miles or so from ground zero, you got several hours of "king's X" between blast and fallout. 
 
My tunnel lights were still on, and we hadn't felt any suction after the blast waves. That suggested the nearest detonation had been many miles distant. According to Shar's texts, the fallout of deadly radioactive ash and grit moved upward into the stem of the mushroom cloud to an altitude of several miles within ten minutes, then more slowly upward and laterally with the wind. Usually the wind speed was fifteen to forty miles an hour. While it was cooling, the stuff fell heavily from the mushroom cloud, which, at first, moved laterally at great speed. But if you were directly beneath that initial cloud you would've already taken enough thermal and shock damage so that only a miracle or a deep, hermetically sealed hideyhole would've made it of any interest to you.
I didn't know where the blasts had occurred. If they had been more than fifteen miles away, I'd probably have a few hours in which to assess damage, fight fires, or pray before the slowly descending ashfall dropped several miles downward to begin frying everything it fell on.
Kate seemed to be improving. "We made it through the first round," I told her, huffing to my feet: "Now we've gotta make sure the place isn't burning up or falling down. You up to it?"
Her olive skin was sallow but, "We'll know if I keel over," she said, and let me help her up.
I led her back to my office, touched my liquor cabinet where I'd hidden the detent, swung back the bottle-laden shelf. I fingered the detent for her to see. "Just a simple pressure latch. Always keep it shut when you're not using what's in here. And never pick up anything you don't know how to use."
"Jesu bambino," she breathed, goggling at the tools of my trade: "I thought alcohol and firearms didn't mix. Is all that stuff legal?"
"Perfectly," I lied, and pointed out the few things she might need. "Malonitrile spray up here—better than Mace; the target pistol over here, the twenty-two longs for its magazine down there," I pointed among the ammo boxes. The extra sunglasses and thin leather gloves were self-explanatory. I'm always losing the damn things so I keep a dozen pairs of each on hand.
"What on earth is that thing in the middle, a cannon?"
"Near enough," I grunted, swinging the liquor shelf back. She'd seen my heavyweight, the sawed-off twelve-gauge auto shotgun with two pistol grips and a vertical magazine as thick as a two-by-four. That fat magazine held sixteen cartridges filled with double-ought buckshot, and the thoroughly illegal twelve-inch barrel fired a pattern that couldn't miss at ten yards. I could also hide it inside a coat front. Frankly, I didn't like the thing and had flashed it only once, at a man whose own emm-oh included concealable shotguns. He had just blinked and then had gone down on his face without a word. "That's one of the gadgets you don't want to pick up," I told her. "If you weigh under two hundred pounds it'll knock you on your can."
"I'll take your word for it." She put on her glasses and we went upstairs.
I first studied the kitchen ceiling and walls, which showed no cracks or wrinkles, and then bobbed my head up to window level for a fast glance outside, taking care with the splinters of glass on the floor. I saw nothing unusual, but the nearby hills impeded my view. "Sweep up this stuff before it dices us, will you?" I crunched my way into the spacious old dining room, mourning the shambles where window glass had speared into my glass-fronted china cabinet. The living room seemed undamaged and I saw no sign of danger through the intact multipaned north and east windows. The parlor windows had held, too. They revealed a sky innocent of intent to kill. I took the stairs two at a time to check on the second floor.
My first glance out the splinter-framed bathroom window upstairs made me duck by reflex action. Boiling into the stratosphere many miles north, an enormous dirty ball of cloud writhed on the skyline above my neighboring hilltops, showing streaks of red, like blood oozing out through crevices in burned fat. I risked another look; realized the target had been either the old mothball fleet anchored in Suisun Bay or Travis AFB, twice as far away. For all its agonized motion, the top of that cloud did not seem to be climbing very quickly, but from all reports it had to be. That meant it must be twenty miles or so away from us, and the prevailing winds were west to east. That hideous maelstrom of consumed rock and organic matter—including ash that had been trees, homes, human flesh—would scatter downwind for hundreds of miles but might miss us entirely. Given a direction and approximate distance, I knew the target had been Travis.
In retrospect I keep juggling ideas about preparation and luck. The Travis bomb was a ground-pounder which vaporized a million tons of dirt and, irradiating it in the cloud stem, lifted it to be flung in a lethal plume beyond Sacramento into the Sierra. Bad luck for anyone in that plume, my good luck to be out of its path. Nor could I have affected some Russki decision to kill Hamilton AFB and Alameda with low airbursts, which started vast firestorms but scooped up relatively little debris to add to their fallout plumes. From my view, that was all luck.
Yet our understanding wasn't luck; it was the result of Shar's classwork and Ern's inside knowledge. I knew it was likely that a ground-pounder was more likely to be used against hardened targets: missile silos, underground munitions, control centers under concrete and bedrock. And I knew what else I needed to find out, such as the locations of those other detonations and the extent of the damage to my roof. I climbed the attic stairs, pushed the door aside, and let my flashbeam play across an immediate problem.
My central roof beam, a rough-sawn timber supported by A-frames, had buckled halfway between its slanting supports. No telling how soon it might completely collapse without a jury-rigged support, but I couldn't see light through the roof and wanted it to stay that way. An intact roof would keep fallout particles from drifting down into the attic—a little more distance between our heads and hard radiation. I had laid fiberglass batts between the attic joists for insulation, but it wasn't much protection against fallout; too fluffy and porous.
I called for Kate to accompany me and puffed out to the garage, pausing on the screen porch to snap the circuit breaker to my water pump. The garage and smithy hadn't come through unscathed. A pressure wave had slanted the clapboard west wall, taking the window out. I had two things in mind: checking for damage to the structure lest it fall on the Lotus, and collecting tools to dismantle the child's swing set I'd erected outside, years before, for Cammie and Lance. The tubular A-frame of the swing set was rusty but ideal for propping up that broken beam in my attic. Now a dozen other problems intervened, each clamoring for top priority.
I stopped and looked around, breathing hard. Some things Kate could do alone—I hoped. But she didn't know where I kept my tools, so I'd have to collect things. Rummaging for my necessaries, I explained. "Kate, in the root cellar are two rolls of clear polyethylene wrap, about knee-high, the kind of plastic you can unwrap and nail over broken windows. It may have a brand name on it—Visqueen, I think. One roll is two-mil—uh, too flimsy. Get the ten-mil stuff and haul it out here. It's eight feet wide when you unfold it. Cut a piece and stretch it across outside this broken window, and then do the same on all the house windows, upstairs and down, okay?"
She was already sprinting for the root cellar. I found the short, big-headed roofing nails and hammer, placed snips next to them, then snatched up penetrating oil, wrenches, and my other hammer and hauled my freight into the yard. I met Kate on the way, toting her milk-white roll of plastic film. I pointed to her tools and then attacked the swing set's rusty bolts with oil.
Kate looked into the sky—wishing, I supposed, for an umbrella. "Why not nail the plastic over the windows from the inside?" she asked.
"Makes a better seal on the outside," I hollered, more snappish than I intended. "You're trying to keep the wind from blowing tiny particles of radioactive ash indoors. If a breeze slaps a plastic sheet that's on the outside, it'll only make the edges hug tighter instead of bulging open between the nails."
I found it hard to explain one thing while doing another, and it made me clumsy. Naturally I ripped my sleeve while detaching the chains of the two little swings. It occurred to me that those sturdy chains could serve as guy wires if I drove nails into the links, so I piled the chains where I wouldn't forget. And forgot. One bolt hung up, and I was in the act of swinging the hammer when I recalled that if I put one little dent in the tube, most of its stiffness would be lost. I managed to ease the blow, and with that, the whole tubular framework squealed and collapsed, and I bundled the pieces so I could carry them over my shoulders.
Kate was spacing her nails only at the corners. "You need a nail head every six inches," I shouted.
"I've been thinking about the way people use this stuff on unfinished houses," she called back. "They nail strips of wood all the way around the edges."
She was right. "I don't have any furring strips," I began, then remembered. "Yes I do! Some old strips of wooden molding on the floor against the smithy wall. Break 'em up as you need 'em and go to it! If you need more, just—just use the hammer's claw and pull the molding loose in the rooms upstairs." That hurt; I'd mashed many a finger installing the stuff. I carried the tubing up to the attic, wondering how much of my place we'd have to cannibalize while securing its basement.
In my haste I'd removed bolts I hadn't needed to remove, wasting time instead of thinking it through. It was hot work in the attic without much light, and only when I'd reassembled the A-frames did I notice that they were too long by a foot. And I'd need those chains, and big twenty-penny nails to help anchor the tubular legs and the chains. What I needed most was another set of hands and a heaping dose of calm. I was starting to act suspiciously like a panic-stricken klutz.
Okay, so I might have to cut the ends of the tubes off. My list of hardware lengthened: swings with chains attached, hacksaw, nails, battery-powered lamp (my three-way emergency flasher from the Lotus would do), and stubs of two-by-four. If the steel A-frames simply didn't work, I might have to break into an upstairs interior wall for wooden supports. That meant I'd need a pry-bar and wood saw. Dashing downstairs and outside, I called to Kate: "Great; neater than I'd have done it!" She had woman-handled my telescoping ladder from the garage and was stretching a sheet of poly film across my kitchen window.
I dumped trash from a hefty cardboard box in the garage; placed nails, pry-bar, and saws inside; then simply swept an array of hand tools from their places over my workbench and added them to the load. I grabbed my flasher lamp from the Lotus and grinned in spite of everything as Spot plopped down in the passenger seat with a little falsetto yawp. It was his way of begging a ride. Poor fool cat, he was infected by all this hurry and could think of nothing more exciting than a nice little rip down the road. Which was the last thing in the world I intended to do. Or was it?
"Sorry, fella," I told him, returning with the box to get the chains. Kate was trying to lengthen the ladder, having finished with the broken first-floor windows. I parked my load on the screen porch and helped her.
"I'll have to steal that molding upstairs," she said, hoisting her shoulder bag by its sling. Bright girl: she'd dumped her bag and used it now to tote hammer and nails up the ladder. The scissors she was using to slit the plastic weren't mine; a matched set of stilettos so sharp she didn't need to snip with them. I wondered how near I'd been to getting them between my ribs earlier in the day, then thought again about her ability to fend for herself. Kate was street-smart; more so than my sis and her family.
"Kate, it's five thirty, roughly a half-hour since the bombs. More could hit any minute and you know where to take cover if they do. Judging by those clouds," I stabbed a finger to the west, then north, "we may have only a few hours before fine gritty ash starts falling here."
"Tell me later," she grunted with another fine leg show as she leaned out to my upstairs bathroom window.
"I may not be here later." She stopped, frowned down at me, her brows asking her question, so I answered it. "I intended to bring all my tools and stored fuel from the garage to the tunnel, but I can't do that and check on my sis, too. If I hadn't listened to Shar, I wouldn't be any better prepared for this than your average bozo. Her family is somewhere out there," I nodded at the southern skyline, "and you can see parts of the road from where I'm going. Believe me, I intend to be back soon, but I've got to do this. I've got to," I repeated as though arguing with somebody, which I was: my own sense of self-preservation. I started to give her more instructions but there would be no end to them, so I shut my trap and turned away toward the garage.
"It's only fair to tell you," she called after me. "When I lock myself up in that basement without you, it won't be with a full-grown cheetah."
A clutch of scenarios fled past me as I headed for the garage with Spot at my side. Each scene led to some innocent act on Kate's part that would cause Spot to show her a modest warning. Not that his threats are loud, as big cats go, but a raised ruff and an ears-back show of his front scissors will scare the piss out of a Doberman pinscher. Who would blame Kate for unlimbering my target pistol against him the instant his spinal ridge fur came erect?
For that matter, I wasn't sure how well Spot could accept a week of confinement, and I worried about that as I fired up the Lotus and eased it from the garage. I told Spot to stay, sizzled toward the closed gate, then shouted, "Spot: come," before engaging the fans to leap the fence. I was twenty yards ahead of him when I called out. Would you believe the lanky bugger beat my Cellular over an eight-foot fence?
It had been a silly stunt, I saw, as Spot's half-canine claws raked the paint of my rear deck. But I was only doing thirty-five at the moment—half-speed for him across open ground. Spot scrabbled into the seat and placed a forepaw against the dash, settling his chin onto the door sill, sniffing the air. I hurled the Lotus along an access path leading to the fire lane up the mountain.
Every few years a brush fire proved the wisdom of fire lanes, bulldozed paths along ridge tops that cleared away brush and grass as a barrier against wildfire. A four-wheel-drive vehicle or a ground-effects car like my Cellular could follow a fire lane all the way to the top, if you avoided the occasional boulder. And the new obstacles that I should've counted on, but hadn't. People.
 
For the first five minutes I had to dodge only a farmer and his cream-yellow Charolais cattle along the lower slopes. The man didn't even disfavor me with a glance. Whatever errand took me over his property, the responsibility for his dairy herd made him single-minded. I hoped he could keep them all under a roof for many days since (Shar had told me) cattle and dogs aren't as resistant to radiation as, say, swine and poultry.
Then a middle-aged man passed me on a scrambler bike at a suicidal pace, bounding down from the fire lane. Jesus, but he was good! The burrrp and snarlll of his engine vied with my Lotus for only a moment, making me realize how much noise I was making on my way up. Spot's senses beggared mine; the quick jerk of his head revealed a young fellow who was evidently prying debris from the drive chain of his bike. Then a girl Kate's age slithered and slewed downhill on a trail motorbike, hair flying, riding point for a half-dozen others who were taking their half of the fire lane right down the middle. I like to think it was a family making good on their preparations for urban disaster. I didn't enjoy taking evasive action, but I couldn't expect amateur bikers to maintain much control down such a grade.
The first lone hiker I spied was trying to blend into the scrub, a biker's leather pack slung from one shoulder, his right hand thrust into it as he watched me pass. No doubt he'd heard me coming, and if he'd had more time, I suspect I'd have seen a handgun. Pure defense? A 'jacking? He probably couldn't have controlled the Lotus in ground-effects mode, but when a man's eyes are as wild as his were, you can't expect him to give a whole lot of thought to his actions. More bikers appeared on my skyline, bobbing toward me; then a few single hikers, all with small packs or none at all. I wondered why until I saw the logic of it.
On the other side of the ridge top lay the entire south and east Bay Areas, a series of forested ridges becoming rolling open meadows with farms and, in the valleys, bedroom communities: San Ramon, Danville, Dublin, Pleasanton. To the southwest stretched Oakland and other big population centers that would be feeding terrified throngs into the imagined safety of the hills. The vast nuclear hammer blows had struck forty minutes before—any people fleeing up the highland roads might've abandoned the roads when the great shocks came, especially those who were most highly mobile. And nothing but a baja-rigged sportscar was as mobile as a tough lightweight scrambler bike. No wonder the first wave of evacuees down the fire lane consisted almost wholly of bikers!
More bikers passed. One bike lay in the edge of the scrub, its front wheel fork ruined, and I guessed that the guy who was afoot with the saddlebag and the frightened eyes had abandoned it. Then Spot's attention drew mine to tiny figures that bobbed across open heights; people afoot who had abandoned the fire lane, perhaps fearful of the onrushing bikers. I saw a half-dozen of them in the next few minutes, one squatting over another who lay face-down. I couldn't tell if it was a mugging, but in my work you tend to infer the worst and I figured the rough stuff was only beginning among people who would need each other damned soon.
I topped out on the last ridge near state park property, staring down to locate the road from Livermore, then let my gaze sweep to the cities along San Francisco Bay. I said, "Oh—my—God."
 
Parking the car just off the fire lane, I made Spot stay as my sentry, retrieving the snub-nose little piece I kept clipped under the dash with its cutaway holster. Twenty miles away, where Oakland fronts the bay, was—had been—Alameda. Now the entire region, miles across, lay half-obscured under a gray pall like dirty fog. Winking through it were literally thousands of fires, some of them running together by now. Black plumes roiled up from oil storage dumps, and as I watched, a white star glared in the bay, hurling debris up and away in all directions. Even faster than the debris, flying away in what seemed a mathematically precise pattern, a ghostly shock wave expanded through the smoke, fading as it spread from its epicenter. In the paths of the debris, spidery white traceries of smoke fattened into a snowy mile-wide chrysanthemum that hid the source of that mighty blast. It looked like one of the old phosphorus shells from an earlier war, but an incredibly enormous one. I guessed it had been a shipload of munitions.
All the smoke over Oakland seemed drawn toward Alameda; in fact, sucked toward the broad foot of the smoke column we'd been taught to call a mushroom cloud. But this mushroom had a ring around it and several heads, the top one so unimaginably high that it seemed nearly above me. The mind-numbing quantity of energy released by that airburst had heated every square inch below it so that the very earth, like incandescent lava, heated the surrounding air and triggered leviathan updrafts that fed the stem of the cloud. I was watching a city consumed by fire, the updrafts creating winds that howled across skeletal buildings and fed flames that would rage until nothing burnable remained.
Nothing could live in or under that hellish heat unless far down in some airtight subbasement. Even after everything on the surface was consumed, the heat, baking down into the earth below fried macadam, would linger for many hours to slowly cook the juices from any organic tissue that might have somehow survived the first hour of firestorm. In a few hours there would not be a child—a tree root—an amoeba—living within miles of ground zero.
Far to the south another deadly column climbed through the stratosphere. Its shape was different, its pedestal and ring of smoke broader, with one well-defined globular head that was beginning to topple, so it seemed, eastward, blown by prevailing high-altitude winds. I wondered if any USAF personnel had bunkers in Sunnyvale deep enough to live through that ground-level wallop. The firestorm raging into San Jose was too distant for me to see flames, but the smoke suggested low-level winds blowing east to west toward Sunnyvale.
Nearer to me, some traffic moved, but for the most part the arterials were simply clotted into stagnation. A faint boom, horn bleats, and beneath it a soft whispering rumble told me of a million lethal scenes being played out below me against a backdrop of Armageddon. A pair of bikes braapped past me fifty yards off, and a dozen hikers labored up the slopes, reminding me of a crowd straggling away from the site of some vast sporting event after the fun was all over.
Short stretches of Morgan Road were visible from a promontory some distance away, and I turned to get my stubby 7-by-50 monocular from the glove box only to see a man in a half-crouch trading eye contact with Spot. He hadn't seen me. The man wore a business suit and expensive shoes and he was motionless except for his right hand, which was drawing a medium-caliber automatic, very slowly, from a hip pocket.
"I wouldn't," I said. He jerked his head around, saw me holding my little .38 in approved two-handed police stance, and wisely decided that he wouldn't, either. "Just put it back in your pocket, Jasper, and don't look back. I don't want to kill you—but I don't much want not to at the moment."
The handgun disappeared. He tried to smile but his sweat-streaked face wanted to cry instead. "Lotus and cheetah," he enumerated, licking dust-caked lips. "I know you. Can't recall the name, but word gets around. My name's Hollinger; I'm an attorney." And I will be damned if he didn't two-finger a little embossed card from his vest!
I ignored it, watching his hands as I moved to the car and fumbled for my gadgetry. "I haven't time to chat and neither do you, Mr. Hollinger." I waved him away with the revolver as I came up with the monocular, not wanting him near while I peered through it.
"Look, my car's two miles back, on the shoulder. No fuel. Cadillac. I'll sign it over to you for a lift to Santa Rosa."
I chuckled. "Tried to sandbag us, and now you want to plea-bargain. You're a lawyer, all right." I motioned him away.
He wasn't used to summary judgments. "The emerald in this ring is worth five big ones, buddy. It's yours for a lift. You won't get many offers this good."
"In two weeks there may be emeralds available for anybody who likes 'em. God Almighty couldn't get you to Santa Rosa right now; you waited too long. Put the fucking ring in your pocket, stay off the fire lanes, and look for shelter in Antioch." He crossed his arms, threw his head back, and inhaled. "Or I can put you out of your misery right now because you're starting to bug me," I finished, thumbing the hammer.
He turned and ran; limping, cursing, and sobbing, ignoring my free advice. I scratched Spot between the ears as I watched the man scramble down, and stuck my convincer away as a fortyish couple approached. They were both rangy, with small scruffy-looking packs, Aussie hats, and high-top hiking boots; and the man saluted me casually as they passed. They didn't seem panicky and their faces were weathered from many a day in the open. They weren't breathing as hard as I was and I was glad for them, hoping they could translate their readiness into long-term survival. If only Shar and Ern had kept up their daily two-mile runs—one of the many fads she'd badgered him into during the past years—I'd have felt more confident about them. Now, they were probably somewhere below me to the southwest, waiting for a road to unclog or pedaling their second-stage vehicles, or maybe lying in a ditch with bullets in their heads while some business-suited opportunist pedaled away with their survival packs.
I knew my kinfolk; they'd all reach me together or not at all. Scanning the road, I saw that something had blocked it in one of the ravines beyond my view, for a solid line of traffic formed a chain that wound for miles to the south, perhaps to Livermore. Nothing larger than a big bike traversed the road nearby, and for every citizen who headed for my ridge, twenty kept to the roadway. I hoped they didn't expect too much when they got to Concord, and hoped I was wrong about that, though I wasn't. Singletons moved faster than groups, a moving panoply of Americana. One old guy trundled a wheeled golf bag along; not, I hoped, stuffed with putters. Most evacuees carried something and most showed that they hadn't given their evacuation much thought until the last possible moment. When I saw the man, woman, and two kids loping along my heart did a samba stumble-beat, but it wasn't my family after all. I guessed they were active in scouting because they walked fifty paces, trotted fifty, then walked again. They were the only group that overtook most singletons.
Maybe, I thought, I should drive along the ridge, stopping to scan the road from time to time; in for a penny, in for a pound. Then I glanced toward the Travis cloud and saw, slightly to the north of west, the enormous dark thunderhead approaching from Hamilton AFB. It loomed higher than the evening cirrus, curling up and toward me from where San Rafael must have been. Its lower half hid behind the flank of the nearby mountain but it was obviously, lethally, a fallout-laden megacloud heading in my direction.
I might be in for a pound, but not for the full ton. I didn't know how long it would take the dust to fall forty thousand feet. Not long enough to let me backtrack to Livermore, for damn sure. Ern had brought me a fax copy of a manual that showed how to build an honest-to-God fallout meter, but I hadn't built the effing thing, and in any case it wasn't enough to know you were frying in radiation. You had to get away from it.
I stepped into the car again, sorrowing for all the people who, walking in the shadowed flank of Mount Diablo, could not see that they were moving straight into another shadow that could banish all their future sunshine forever. I started my engine before I saw the youngster hauling his trail-rigged moped upslope.
"If it's broken, leave it," I called to him.
"Just out of gas," he said with a grin, puffing. His moped was one of the good four-cycle, one-horse jobs that didn't need oil mixed with its fuel.
What I did then shamed me, but at least I didn't con the kid. "See that cloud?" I pointed toward the dull gray enormity curving toward us across the heavens. "Fallout. Those people won't know it until too late, unless you tell 'em."
"Me? Mister, my tongue is just about hanging down into my front wheel spokes." Impudence and good humor: I wanted to hug him.
"If you'll do it, I'll fill that little tank of yours. Get somebody to erect a sign or something. Tell 'em"—I glanced at my watch and swallowed hard—"that fallout will be raining down from San Rafael in a few hours. They must find shelter before then. Deal?"
He nodded. I got my spare coil of fuel hose from the tool compartment. One nice thing about an electric fuel pump is that you can quick-disconnect its output line and slip another hose on, then turn on the car's ignition and let it pump a stream of fuel from your fuel line to someone else's tank. The kid had his tank cap off in seconds and tried to stammer his thanks.
"I'm letting you take chances for me," I admitted. "It could cost you."
"My aunt in Walnut Creek has a deep basement," he replied. "With this refill I can stay on the road and get there in an hour." He was priming his little flitter as I reattached my fuel line. "Is that a real cheetah?"
"Yep, and a good one. I can never catch him cheating."
He laughed and bounced away, refitting his goggles, and didn't look back. Neither did I. If he didn't stop to warn others on the road below me, I didn't want to know. I also did not want to scan the carnage again that stretched across the dying megalopolis. I no longer felt anger; only profound pity for good honest people whose chief transgression lay in thirty years of refusal to prepare for a disaster so monstrous that no government could save them from it. I hadn't felt tears on my cheeks for years, but as I nosed the Lotus downhill toward my place, I decided these didn't count. They were mostly self-pity, in advance, for the loss of my little sis and her family. They were my family, too.
I didn't feel like shooing Spot out to lighten the car's load for another fence-jump. Besides, there was always the chance of a miscalculation, which could snag a tire and throw the Lotus off balance, and I was beginning to consider every screw-up in context of a total moratorium on medical help. So I toggled the automatic gate control. Nothing. Usually at this hour of lengthening shadow—it was past six—I could see distant lights from a few places up and down the road from my place. Not now. The power from Antioch had failed. It was a little late for me to wish I'd installed a wind-powered alternator or even an engine-driven rig. I hadn't.
I unlocked the gate using the manual combination, let Spot in, pushed the damn car through because it was such a chore to get my lardbutt in and out, then relocked the gate, wondering if Ern would recall that combination; wondered if he'd get the chance to. I saw honey-gold hair flying, the girl running to meet me as I scooted for the garage, and thought it was Kate until I remembered Kate's hair was black. Ern wouldn't have to remember any combination because the girl embracing Spot on the shadowed lawn was my niece, Camille!
She gave me a big smack as I left the car. "Scared the heh-heh-hell out of us, Uncle Harve," she scolded, starting to sniffle, trying to get an arm all the way across my shoulders as we headed for the root cellar.
"Just taking a look around," I lied as Shar met me on the steps.
I got a quick tearful hug and kiss from my sis, whose dark Rackham hair was tied back from her round, attractively plumpish features. In response Shar had a faint upcurl at one corner of her mouth that tended to make a man check his fly for gaposis. In action she was a doer, an organizer; and I saw that the upcurl was now only part of a thin line. "Ernie and Lance are making a fallout meter in your office," she said and added darkly, "while your cutie-pie tapes around doors and windows upstairs. Harve, I thought you said we wouldn't turn the place into a public shelter."
"So everybody's here, and you've met Kate." I sighed my relief, letting my arms drop, realizing I was already tired and getting hungry. "Sis, we need to bring in everything movable from the garage and smithy storage and stack it in the tunnel."
"Done, thanks to your little flesh," Cammie cracked, and I needed a moment to translate her high-school jargon. She was linking me to Kate.
Before I could protest, Shar put in: "Your friend seemed ready to fight us off until Ernie told her who we were and proved he had your gate combination. That young lady runs a taut ship."
"She's led a rough life," I said and shrugged, then saw the welter of materials where Shar had been working in the root cellar. "What's all this?"
Shar's irritated headshake made her ponytail bounce. Like me, Shar inherited a tendency toward overweight. Unlike me, she had fought it to keep some vestige of a youthful figure, and diets were among her fads. They kept her bod merely on the zaftig side but also made her snappish and hyperactive. Now she was both. "I know you kept those outside cellar doors decrepit just for atmosphere," she said, bending in the gloom to choose a strip of plywood. "But they're no seal against fallout. If we intend to use the tunnel, someone has to stretch plastic film over these doors before we tape them shut. As they are now with all those cracks, they're hopeless. Just hopeless," she repeated with a sigh that richly expressed Why Mothers Got Gray.
My root cellar was so crowded with stuff from the garage that there was barely room for my sis to work. Obviously the whole bunch had arrived shortly after I'd left, because they'd done half a day's toting in half an hour. "You'll need light in here," I said in passing.
"You're in the way, Uncle Harve," said Cammie, and I saw that she was perched on her bike at the tunnel mouth. Ern had talked about rigging old-style bike stands, the kind that elevated the rear wheel and swiveled up like a wide rear bumper for riding; but he hadn't built them. Instead someone had taken two of my old folding chairs, put them back to back a foot apart, and strapped wooden sticks between them so that they formed a support frame to elevate the bike's rear wheel. As I stepped aside, Cammie began to pedal and the fist-size headlamp of her bike glowed, then dazzled, illuminating Shar's work. "Sonofabitch," I chortled. "Score one point for cottage industry."
The tiny DC generator on the rear wheel whined quietly, and I noticed that Cammie had removed the red lens from the puny little tail lamp. In the gathering dark of the tunnel, its glow wasn't all that puny. I trotted through the tunnel, every muscle protesting, feeling every ounce of my extra flab.
Soft creaks above me said that someone was hurrying between windows, taping around the edges to keep out the finest dust particles. Since I hadn't told Kate how to do it or showed her where I kept the inch-wide masking tape, I figured Shar had done it for me. The dozen rolls of tape in cool dark storage had been Shar's idea in the first place. I moved around the stone divider that defined my office to find my brother-in-law, his reading glasses halfway down his nose, his light blue eyes peering at the manual he'd left with me long before. His massive red-haired forearms were crossed on my desk top.
Ern McKay's calves and forearms had been designed for a larger man. In other physical details he was medium, with short carroty hair balding in front and stubby fingers that should've been clumsy. They were, in fact, so adroit that Ern made his living with them at Ames. Or had until this day. Ern saved all his clumsiness for social uses; he wasn't the demonstrative sort.
"Hi." He gave me his shy grin over the specs. "Heard you come in. Lance is upstairs looking for your fishing vest. That where you keep your two-pound filament?"
"As you bloody well know," I said, squeezing his shoulder lightly as I studied the pages before him. That was all the greeting either of us needed. Ern was the tyer of dry flies in the family, but I'm the one who got to use them. Two-pound-test monofilament nylon is very thin stuff, the kind I used for leader on scrappy little trout in Sierra streams.
Ern's stumpy forefinger indicated a passage in the manual. "Says here that thin mono is hard to work with though it's otherwise perfect for the electroscope."
"I thought this was a fallout meter, Ern."
He turned his head, vented a two-grunt chuckle typical of his humor: underplayed. "You've had this damn manual five years and never read it once. Got half a mind to tell Shar on you."
"Christ, Ern, have a heart," I mumbled.
He held up the clean empty eight-ounce tin can from among other junk he had collected on my desk: adhesive bandage, razor blade, an oblong of thin aluminum foil, a bottle cork through which he'd forced a hefty needle. "Some guys doped this out years ago at Union Carbide; even got it published through Oak Ridge National Lab, including pages any newspaper could copy, free of charge! Any high school sophomore can build the thing from stuff lying around in the kitchen. If he can read," Ern qualified it.
I had assumed from the official-looking document number, ORNL-5040, that it wasn't kosher to copy it. Apparently the reverse was true, but I'd never read it carefully. The damned manual was in the public domain!
"Fellow named Kearny ramrodded several projects at Oak Ridge oriented toward nuke survival," Ern said, "and his team deserves top marks. The Kearny Fallout Meter is just a capacitor, a foil electroscope really, that's calibrated by the time it takes to lose its static charge after you feed that little charge to it. It loses that charge in an environment of ionizing radiation—the kind that makes fallout such a killer—and you can recharge it by rubbing a piece of plexiglass with paper to build up another charge."
"I understand only about half of what you just said," I complained.
"That's the point: you don't have to. Follow the instructions, learn to read the simple chart here, and you can use it without knowing why it works."
"Is it the kind of thing that only tells you when you're as good as dead? I mean, hell, Ern, it can't have much of a range of sensitivity."
"Take an F in guesswork. It works through four orders of magnitude," Ern replied, flipping pages to a sheet with a chart meant to be glued around that tin can. "From point-oh-three rems per hour—which is hardly worth worrying about—to forty-three rems per hour," he said with feeling.
"Which means kiss your ass good-bye," I hazarded.
"That's the layman's phrase," he harrumphed, subtly playing the quarrelsome scientist for me. "At NASA we say 'anus.' Ten hours at forty rems an hour and it's an even bet you won't live long."
"You're a little ray of sunshine."
"Just be glad," he said, tapping the pages, "that Kearny's elves realized nobody would buy expensive radiation counters until it was too late. They engineered this thing so well even you could build it for thirty cents—and why didn't you? And where the devil is Lance? I'm ready for that monofilament line."
"My fishing vest is in the screen porch closet," I said, and trotted upstairs. Only it wasn't in the closet. I called Lance.
From somewhere on the second floor came his muffled eleven-year-old tenor: "Come find me."
Sometimes Lance was eleven going on thirty, and sometimes going on seven. What rankled most was that he looked so much like I did at his age; beefy, shock of black hair, insolent button-black eyes under heavy brows. But mom hadn't spoiled me, hadn't let me hurl tantrums. I'd grown up with due respect for dad's belt. That was where Lance and I differed; my sis had figured her youngest for a genius since he began talking so much, so soon, and ruled against breaking his spirit. In that, at least, she'd succeeded. "We can play later, Lance," I called up. "Bring my fishing vest if you have it."
"I have it," his voice floated tantalizingly down the stairs. "Come find me."
Kate Gallo paused while tearing a strip of tape with her teeth; smiled at me. "Welcome back, boss." The evening light through the film-covered windows was a dusty pink, tinting the gloom in which she worked.
"Some boss," I said and bellowed, "Goddamnit, Lance, this is life and death!"
"I don't think you'll make much of an impression on that one," Kate murmured and continued working.
"Come fi-i-ind meee," quavered in the air.
So I climbed the stairs and found him in the closet of the guest bedroom his parents sometimes used. "You win," he chirruped and held up my many-pocketed, fish-scented old vest. Then, "You better watch out," he wailed.
My vest in one hand, Lance's belt and trouser back in my other, I carried him like a duffel bag to the window. Kate hadn't sealed it yet but had put the plastic over it outside. "You know why the sunset's so red, Lance?"
"Those smoky clouds. You're hurting my stummick."
"Those clouds are full of poison. The poison will be falling on us tonight and for a long time after. It'll kill us if we don't get ready, Lance. Your help could make the difference."
Sullen, short of breath with his belt impeding it: "Better put me down." Then as I did so, he folded his arms and faced me. "I think that's a lot of crap about clouds being poison. How come airplanes fly through 'em all the time?"
I waved him ahead of me down the stairs. "Haven't you paid any attention to what your folks told you about fallout?"
"Some. Mostly I have better things to do. That stuff is dull." I knew what his better things were; I'd found his caches of comics and kidporn. "Anyway, if any poison comes down, the roof'll stop it."
The roof! I pushed him aside and took the rest of the stairs fast, tossing my vest to Ern. "I'd completely forgot," I said to him, trying to recall where I'd stashed my tools. "The central roof beam buckled from concussion. We've got to shore it up, Ern. Could you finish that thing later?"
He tapped the little cork with the needle in it; only the tip of the needle was exposed. He'd made several tiny holes in the tin can that way, following the manual but using amateur model-builders' tricks to do a neater job. "Guess the roof is top priority," he mused, then arose and called into the tunnel. "Shar, when you're finished, will you and Cammie haul mattresses and bedding down here?"
"Another few minutes," Shar's voice echoed.
Cammie, faintly: "Isn't sealing the tunnel more important?"
"Yes," Ern and I chorused. Bedding or no bedding, the tunnel was the safest spot on my place. I'd had it dug with a backhoe as a deep, broad trench years before, a passageway from the old farmhouse to the root cellar. Then, by hand, I had dug a shoulder a foot wide and three feet deep on each side, running the length of the tunnel. Finally I laid cheap discarded railroad ties across that shoulder with a layer of heavy tar paper between the cross-tie roof and the dirt I shoveled onto it.
During one rainy season the tunnel had stood three inches deep in water, thanks to my incompetence. After that I dug a smaller, foot-deep trench along one side of the bottom of the tunnel, laying perforated plastic pipe in the hole with gravel around it before I installed a floor and wall paneling. The perforated pipe took ground water that percolated into the gravel. I had to dig another trench by hand around the old concrete foundation of the house so I could install more drainage pipe to carry ground water downhill from the tunnel and the house—but that kept the basement dryer, too. With that mod, my old place no longer had the dank, musty, moldy basement common to many old homes. I'd be lying if I claimed it was all done for nuclear survival, but my dry tunnel beneath cross ties and three feet of damp soil provided protection you could beat only in a mine shaft. According to Shar's texts, the tunnel had a fallout protection factor several times greater than the basement itself.
In Shar's jargon, the basement under my two-story house was rated at a PF of over 30; that is, over thirty times as much protection as you'd get walking around outside in shirt sleeves, which is no protection to speak of. The PF got better when I blocked off my one basement window with dirt; that's why I did it. It would've been better still had I thrown a ramp of earth up against the exposed concrete foundation, which was visible for a foot or so below the clapboard siding.
Shar estimated that with the window blocked off (and the long, hinged trapdoor lowered over the stairwell so that it became, in best farmhouse tradition, a segment of my kitchen floor), my basement could have a PF of nearly fifty. If fallout radiation got as high as a hundred rems per hour outside, it might be only two rems per hour in the basement.
Of course, two rems an hour weren't good for you. If you absorbed that much radiation steadily for a week, your body would get a total exposure of 336 rems during that time. Chances were one in three that you'd die in a month or so from such a dose.
The operative word there was "steadily": fallout particles radiate so much during the first day or so, they're only emitting ten percent as strongly seven hours after the blast; one percent as strongly after two days. After fifteen days that emission rate is only one tenth of one percent as much as it was during the first moments of that monstrous fireball.
That dwindling radiation rate was the rationale for staying put awhile—and for optimism. If radiation rose to deadly levels outside, we would experience only a small fraction of it in my basement. Sure, it was still dangerous. We might get sick; we might even contract cancer and die in a few years. In my book a few years beats hell out of a few days.
But Shar's hundred-rem-per-hour estimate had been wildly optimistic. As Ern chased me up to the attic, we had no idea that the particles slowly drifting down toward us from forty-thousand-foot altitude were from the very center of the Hamilton cloud, so ferociously lethal they should've glowed in the dark. They didn't, of course.
 
Stepping carefully to avoid fiberglass insulation, we still got it in our eyes and cussed it as we worked. Ern had a better understanding of structures than I did; he judged we could make a four-legged pyramid from the A-frame tubes. We used up ten minutes putting the A-frames in place with only my lamp to illuminate us, straddling the tube butts on joists and nailing stubs of two-by-four to keep the butt ends from skating away. Then I braced my legs, put my head and both forearms under the cracked roofbeam, and Ern helped me lift.
A pain like an electric shock banged alongside my spine. I'd half-expected it. Given plenty of time, Ern would've jacked the beam up by an old expedient: a sturdy vertical timber under the roof beam with overlapping hardwood wedges under the vertical piece. By driving the wedges toward each other with a hammer, a slender housewife could elevate that timber by the thickness of both wedges; several inches, in fact. Well, we didn't have the time. We did have a tall, heavy-boned idiot with an old back injury—me.
The joists groaned underfoot. Dust and splinters fell from the roof beam. With a great dry groan the center of the beam rose within an inch or so of horizontal. Ern, standing on different joists, panted, "Can you hold?"
"Do it," I grunted, and he rushed to lean the tops of the tubes into place, apexes nearly together under the roof beam.
"Let down easy," he said, holding the tops of the tubes in place. As I did, the tubes bit a half-inch up into the beam—a good thing, since they wanted to slip aside. Ern saw the problem, grabbed the hammer and nails, and drove nails into the beam so their protruding heads held the tube lips from moving. Then, "I still don't like it, but it'll do," he said, and I staggered back. "We should span the break with plywood and screws, Harve, but we don't have the time."
"What if we nailed chains across the bottom of the beam?"
He saw what I meant. If we stretched a chain across the bottom face of the beam, nailing through several links where the wood wasn't split, the beam couldn't sag again without snapping chain or very sturdy nails. "Smart," he agreed, and we did it in two minutes flat. Now he was happy. Ours was a stronger repair than a simple vertical post resting in the middle of a joist, since that lone joist might give way. I suggested that we clear out.
"Oh hell, we didn't block the attic vents," Ern said then as we collected our tools. The little screened vents weren't large, but a strong updraft under the eaves could sift dust into the attic. Ern saw me kneading the muscles near my kidney, told me to wait, and scrambled downstairs. He was back moments later with newspapers I had put in the bedrooms for atmosphere. The front pages were expensive fakes with historic headlines like FIRE RAVAGING SAN FRANCISCO—an appalling irony now—and LUSITANIA TORPEDOED. We thrust the paper, a dozen thicknesses at each vent, flat against the holes and nailed them in place. Then we abandoned the attic and taped the door edges.
Kate and Cammie were rechecking their tape job around upstairs window edges while Shar, with some help from Lance, wrestled mattresses downstairs to the basement. Ern and I shucked off our clothes in my old-fashioned second-floor bathroom and used perfectly clean water from the toilet tank to sponge-bathe, scrubbing off the itchy insulation as well as we could.
On our way downstairs for fresh clothes, Ern tried joking about the picture we made, two middle-aged naked guys scratching where it itched.
"I'll laugh tomorrow," I promised glumly.
Then while he retrieved a coverall he'd left at my place, Ern called to me. "Who's that outside?"
I paused with one foot in my size 46 jeans. "Beats me; we're all inside."
"Spot isn't," he rejoined.
"Why the hell isn't he," I stormed, and pounded out to the back porch while buttoning a long-sleeve shirt.
The back of my roof overhung the screen porch by three feet, but the faint breeze on my cheeks told me the place wouldn't be safe for long. We hadn't stretched film over the screen. Now I heard, from beyond my perimeter fence, a voice either female or falsetto. "Get down, Richard, there's a lion in there!"
This was followed by a male whoop and cries that faded into the distance. I called Spot and waited, peering into a rosy semi-darkness that obscured all but silhouettes of trees and skyline. The glow over the mass of mountain was red on rose. I wondered if fires would spread from Oakland to leap the fire lanes; to engulf us all before dawn. I wondered if I should've let those poor devils in. And I wondered if Spot was radioactive by now.
I finally got my dumb cheetah inside and made him understand that he was to stay in the tunnel. When I returned to my office and told Ern what I'd heard outside, I was too exhausted to ream anyone out for letting Spot roam loose. It was hard to believe that it was only eight o'clock.
Ern, who had to be more weary than I, sat with my battery lamp and sipped from a glass of my brandy as he trimmed rectangles of aluminum foil. "Another hour and I'll know if this one works," he said as I sat on the edge of my waterbed, twenty feet away in my unpartitioned sleeping area. Then he must've heard me grunt. "Hurt your back up there, didn't you?"
My old vertebra compression fracture was an enemy I had to live with. "Just a muscle spasm," I said, and eased myself onto the floor where I could lie flat on the carpet. Sometimes, by forcing myself to relax while lying full-length, I could feel the flutter-crunch of vertebrae unpopping in the small of my back. I closed my eyes. "We had room for those two out there, you know," I said softly.
"Two? It may have been twenty," he replied. "We made that decision a long time back."
"I know."
"When would we stop, Harve? How many could we take?"
I didn't answer. Ours was the classic crowded-lifeboat dilemma: how to decide when taking one more swimmer meant reducing the odds of the lucky occupants. My cop-out was accidental, but no less an avoidance. I fell asleep the instant those vertebrae unkinked.
 
I awoke to feel fingers massaging my scalp so I knew it was Cammie bending over me, speaking softly, urgently, ". . . to get up now. We can't carry you."
I peered into almost total darkness; came up on one elbow, flooded with the sudden awareness of where I was, and why. My forty-by-twenty-foot basement was lit by a single candle, its wick trimmed, that squatted on a low bookshelf in my lounging area. "I can walk," I protested, and saw Ern's bulk disappearing into my tunnel, dragging mattresses. "Whatthehell? Another bomb?"
"It's hot in here, Harve," called my sis, who was lugging a tub of water into the tunnel.
"I don't feel very—" I said, then realized what she meant. "Fallout?"
"Yes, and getting heavier," Cammie said. She hurried off to help carry things to the tunnel as I creaked upright.
My watch was still in the clothes I'd discarded. My digital clock didn't glow because the power was off, and if it hadn't been for that candle, that basement would've been dark as Satan's soul. I learned while blundering into people with books and boxes that I'd slept only three hours, but that little bit had done my back lots of good.
"Wish we could get that damn waterbed in here," Ern groused as I swung the tunnel door closed. He busied himself by passing armloads of books to Shar and Kate, who were restacking them on a bookshelf they'd scrounged from my office. Cammie was on her bike, pedaling to provide enough light for our needs. Lance was sitting on a mattress. And what the hell was I doing? Nothing useful. I didn't have to ask why they were making a barrier of books at the foot of the stairs in the root cellar; instead, I hurried back to the basement and lifted my entire small bookcase of Britannicas, hauling it through the tunnel to help create the book barrier.
If fallout was intense enough to warrant our moving into the tunnel, the radiation through the puny film-covered doors of my root cellar would be high at that end of the tunnel. Distance alone was some help. The right-angle turn into the tunnel helped, too. But thick, dense stacks of paper make an excellent barrier against ionizing radiation—and a shelf of books, Shar's texts claimed, was better than a steel-faced door. She had begun the book barrier directly in front of the root cellar steps and used scraps of lumber nailed across the wooden stairway framing to keep the rickety barrier from toppling.
I leaned against the bookcase to help Shar and watched as Ern rubbed an antique phonograph record against the fur rim of my old parka. The light in the tunnel was dim enough to reveal the blue crackles of static sparkling in the fur. "Ern, what the hell are you—oh," I subsided as he brought the record disc near a whiskery piece of wire that protruded from the top of the tin can in his other hand. He'd finished his fallout meter.
A small spark jumped to the wire. Ern snapped on my lamp, stared down at the tin can, which now had a clear plastic film cover through which the wire protruded. He moved the wire gently. He glanced at his wristwatch, gnawing his lip—and Ern chews that lip only in extremis.
He glared through the plastic cover into the tin can, holding it in the light as if daring it to do him wrong. After a minute he glanced up at me, and his smile was an act of bravery. "The manual tells you to charge the leaves of foil by rubbing a hunk of plexiglass with paper," he said, trying to sound unconcerned. "I remembered how old vinyl records sometimes took a hellacious static charge from wool or fur and stole one of your old LPs and—sure 'nough," he said and shrugged, squinting down into the can again, checking his watch.
I whispered it: "Don't kid me, Ern: how we doin'?"
His reading glasses gleamed as he muttered, "Lots better here." He pointed down into the tin can to show me. "Those little foil leaves are suspended by nylon monofilament. See the inked paper scale I pasted on the plastic top? You center the scale so its zero mark is exactly between the foil leaves, and then see how far out the bottom of each leaf is from zero." Anxiety infiltrated his low baritone. "No, don't lean so close; your eye must be one foot from the scale to give the right parallax—uh, anyway, after a little practice you can get it pretty close without a ruler."
Though I was older than Ern, my eyes haven't yet gone farsighted on me. I could see that the suspended leaves of foil stood slightly apart, defying gravity since their static charges made them repel each other. "I get a reading of two," I said.
He pulled the can back in a hurry, stared at it, glared at me. "Scare the living shit out of a feller," he grumbled. "Two millimeters for one leaf and nearly three on the other. That makes five, Harve. I started about four minutes ago with readings of seven and eight millimeters on the scale. Now"—he checked his watch and nodded—"I read it as two and three. So the bottom edges of the foil leaves have swung nearer by a total of ten millimeters in four minutes. Look at the paper chart on the side of the can."
I did, knowing Ern was not going to tell me how much radiation we were taking because he wanted me to do it myself. "Ten millimeters in four minutes: two rems. In four minutes?"
"Jesus, no! Two rems per hour; you read the dose rate in rems per hour, you nik-nik. Why didn't you build one of these years ago?"
"Because I'm an idiot," I concluded. "And you?"
"Built mine so long ago I forgot half the details. But Lance tore it up trying to get at the hunks of desiccant in the bottom of the can. He was only five. Thought it was candy." Ern tried to make it seem a clever ploy by a blameless child, but I knew his disappointment with Lance was marrow-deep even if he rarely showed it.
To realign the topic away from Lance I said, "Those little hunks of rocks in the bottom are desiccant? Where'd you get it?"
"Knocked a corner from a piece of wallboard under your stairwell," he confessed. "The crumbly stuff in wallboard is gypsum. Kate heated the little hunks inside a tin cup over a candle for a half-hour to make sure they were dry before I put 'em in. You can't afford moisture in this can, and dry gypsum is a desiccant—soaks up the water vapor from the air in the can. It's all in the manual."
I watched Shar and Kate finish their work, conscious of the close quarters and of the muffled echoes in the tunnel. Only Spot and Lance seemed capable of sleep. "Hey, a two-rem reading in here is pretty high, isn't it?"
Ern snorted. "Try it on your porch. For the first two hours I didn't notice the foil leaves relaxing. Then when I wasn't looking, they lost their charge in a hurry. When I charged 'em up again, they sagged by twelve millimeters in one minute flat, which is nearly ten rems an hour. Just to check, I took your lamp and wore your parka out to the porch with a handkerchief over my mouth, and tried to get a reading." His long single headshake was eloquent. "I could actually see the damn aluminum leaves wilting down, and the best spark I can make gives about a sixteen-millimeter reading to start with, and the static charge decayed to zilch, buddy—zero—in just a few seconds."
I stared at the chart pasted on his fallout meter. "That's completely off scale, Ern. Over fifty rems per hour on my porch! Any chance the meter is wrong?"
"Sure there's a chance. You feel like taking that chance?"
"Maybe some other time," I husked. "What do you think the dose rate would be for anyone out in the open?"
"If the protection factors we estimated are any guide, Harve," and now he was whispering, "they could be taking hundreds."
"And their chances after an hour or so—"
"No chance, buddy. Maybe a ghost of one if they got to shelter right after that. But they'd probably be the walking dead, and not walking for long."
I glanced at that steel-faced door, then down the tunnel as Shar moved toward us. "I'm wondering if we'd get a different reading right up against that door, or by the book barrier," I said.
"What could we do about it?"
"If there's a radiation gradient along the tunnel, we could stay in the safest part of it."
"I'm getting stupid with exhaustion," Ern admitted. "You're right." He started past Shar; kissed her forehead.
She was too preoccupied to respond. "All right, girls," she said, "now we must lie down and relax. There's only so much air in here, and the less we exercise, the less we foul the air." Kate had a snippish reply on her face but glanced at me, shrugged, and chose a mattress.
"Until we get our flashlights it's gonna be dark, mom," said Cammie, and slowed her pedaling to prove it.
"Your father has Harve's lamp," my sis replied, and saw Ern nod in confirmation. Moments later the only source of light was my lamp, which Ern conserved as much as possible. The women settled quietly among blankets they didn't really need, and I sat almost as quietly, avoiding exertion.
Ern took readings at the book barrier, then backtracked down the tunnel to the basement door. It took him quite a while because the longer he waited for a reading, the more accurate it was. When he finished at the basement door, I was nearly asleep on the mattress I shared with Kate, who was snoring gently, and no wonder.
He walked to us, roughly midway down the tunnel, and switched off the lamp as he sat next to Shar. "Looks like we did something right by sheerest intuition. Hon? Harve? You awake?"
My sis and I acknowledged it.
Softly he asked, "You awake, Kate?" Silence, if you discounted the mezzo-soprano of her snores. "Cammie?" No answer. "Lance?" No answer. "Okay, team, it's midnight; time for a progress report."
In his travels down the tunnel, Ern had also made sure our food and water were not only present but out of the way. The root cellar was a jumble that we would have to straighten out, because we might be living in these cramped quarters for quite a while.
Near the steel-faced door, he said, the reading was roughly three rems per hour. At the book barrier it was over four. At the midpoint of the tunnel it was only two, maybe a shade less. Without any question, my half-assed root-cellar-door arrangement could have killed us all—might still be killing us, depending on how much dust might get through the sealing job Shar had done with such desperate speed. "The good news is, the radiation level must be dropping," he reminded us. "At least it should be. We'll know for sure in an hour or so." He stopped, listening. Rain drummed against the plastic that covered the root cellar doors, reminding me of a stampede of small animals. Those drops must've been as big as marbles. To my relief, it didn't last long.
"I wonder how fast we're using up the air in here," Shar muttered in the darkness. "Harve, how many cubic feet of air are in the tunnel?"
I made a rough calculation. Seven feet high, four and a half wide, sixty from end to end, plus the volume of the root cellar itself. "Maybe two thousand," I said.
"Not enough," she said with a catch in her voice. "Not even half enough. We're exhaling carbon dioxide into it, fouling what we have, and we need three or four hundred cubic feet an hour each. I'm trying not to panic, but if we fall asleep now, it's possible we'd never wake up."
I could hear their movements and imagined Ern trying, in his diffident way, to comfort my sis. Finally he said, "So we pump fresh air in here somehow."
"My hand-cranked blower in the smithy might do it," I said.
"It might as well be at the North Pole," he rejoined. "It'd take you an hour to detach it and bring it back. You'd be dead in a few days, so forget it. Hold on: your forced-draft furnace blower in the basement has a filter, doesn't it?"
Not much use, I said, when the power was off.
"But we could tap into the air source if we had an air pump. Look, team, I'm having a brainstorm. If we can locate a big sturdy cardboard box, I think I could build a bellows pump with it. A bellows will suck air through a filter better than a squirrel-cage blower does."
Shar said, "It's dangerous, hon. Who's going to stand in the basement and pump it all night?"
But Ern was already up, groaning with fatigue, the lamp shining toward the disorder of the root cellar. "We can run a pipe from the filter box to the tunnel and pump from in here," he insisted, starting to rummage between the bikes. "If either of you has a better idea or can figure where we'll get—um—thirty feet of pipe as wide as your fist, let me know. We need it for an air conduit."
My modern forced-air furnace system sat under the stairs in the basement, linked to sheet-metal conduits. I had no pipe and no ideas. For a long moment I considered just relaxing, taking my chances. Which weren't good, and I'd be whittling away at the chances of three young sleepers and Spot as well. I grunted to my feet and followed Shar, who'd already had a lifesaving idea.
 
Ern chose a corrugated carton big as a two-drawer file cabinet and worked without visible blueprints. He thought Shar's pipe might be too flimsy but had no better answer, and I helped her when I saw what my sis had in mind. Shar just took a stack of old newspaper and started rolling tubes, each tube made from a dozen sheets. I taped the seams. Ern suggested we cover the paper tubes with latex paint to seal the pores in the paper, then countermanded his own idea; it'd take too long to dry. Instead we unrolled my thin two-mil roll of plastic film and sheathed each paper tube with it, taped on the seam. The first two were pretty sorry specimens, wrinkled and repaired with too much tape, but we got better at it. By the time I noticed the muggy, oppressive atmosphere, Shar and I had finished over a dozen knee-high lengths of air pipe made from newsprint.
Ern muttered, "We're going to have to open that basement door soon." Sweat stood on his face. He was breathing a bit too quickly, and so was I. "Shar, you remember how to read the fallout meter from the one I built before?"
She did, but didn't know how to charge it up. I said I'd show her. It was necessary to align that protruding wire with the foil leaves, then move the wire away again after its spark charged the foil. We crowded near my lamp—all hail to the guy who invented rechargeable dry cells—and after a few tries we got it right.
"I'm still getting three rems an hour here in the root cellar," she announced softly after timing it with her watch, then fumbled in the bag strapped to her bike. She withdrew a two-cell flashlight, reminding me that those little second-stage evacuation kits contained everything from raisins to razor blades. I still had no idea what problems they'd had getting to my place—but there'd be plenty of time for those stories in the next week. Assuming we lived that long. Judging from the way our bodies were laboring in that clammy air, I couldn't assume we'd pull through.
Shar went into the basement and closed the door again to take fresh readings; not that we had much choice about them. We would have to go in there and punch into my sheet-metal furnace filter box and insert the air pipe whether we liked the readings or not. Meanwhile I held a heavy polyfilm trapezoid in place while Ern double-taped it onto the big cardboard box.
The box was now cut away so it had a steep wedge shape in side view, with thick polyfilm replacing the trapezoid of cardboard he had cut away. He had cut two holes through the rectangular back of the box, cut a thin-walled mailing tube into two shorter pieces, and taped them firmly into the holes. As we taped polyfilm on, I could see through it into the box. A hastily cut rectangle of cardboard was taped over the mouth of one segment of mailing tube, but only at the top so that the rectangle could flap loose. "You didn't find any more mailing tubes, did you?" I asked.
"Nope. Wish I had. The partial vacuum when I lift this bellows will probably collapse Shar's air pipe—no it won't, either!" He put down the big box and upended another smaller cardboard carton, letting food cans spill onto shelves in the root cellar. "Harve, you cut this box into strips, maybe three inches wide—just so they'll slip into the airpipe. We'll need twice as many inches of cardboard strip as we have of pipe."
I grabbed tin snips, a shitty tool but better than nothing, and began cutting without knowing what Ern had in mind. I saw, though, while cutting the third strip. Ern grabbed the two I had cut, used his keen-edged pocketknife to cut slits lengthwise halfway down the center of each, then forced the slit wider by prying and reversed one strip so the mouths of the slits matched. Then he merely shoved them together so that, seen from the end, the two strips had an X shape. "There, damnit. Shove that down the air pipe and it won't collapse." It was good to hear the satisfaction in his tone. It said he wasn't licked yet.
Shar returned with guarded optimism as Ern attacked his project again. He was making a handle from the folded widths of cardboard but looked up expectantly. "What reading did you get in the basement, honey?"
"About fifteen rems an hour at the desk."
"That's a shade less than I got."
"Funny thing, though: I get about eight at the stairwell, and the same at the other end of the room near the waterbed."
We considered this in silence. Shar cooed in delight when she saw how my cardboard strips stiffened her air pipes and began assembling the things as I cut them. Then, "Hon, you're stumbling like a wino," she warned Ern. "And my headache is definitely worse."
Without a word he lifted his bellows pump, tape, and tools; staggered down the tunnel; managed to get the door open. We were gradually asphyxiating in the root cellar's stagnant air, and it wasn't much past midnight.
I grabbed a double armload of air pipe and caromed off the paneling en route to the basement, leaving Shar to bring what I'd left. Ern helped me to the stairwell. Though I was dizzy, I had no headache and said as much.
Ern, breathing deeply in the basement, located the filter intake box of my furnace system and selected the large blade of his bulky Swiss pocketknife, then jabbed hard into the bottom face of the thin sheet-metal box. Using the heel of his hand to hammer the blade in, he glanced at me. "Foul air doesn't affect everyone the same, Harve. Tell me: what's twelve times eleven?"
I blinked, swayed. "Uh—look it up," I said.
"Headache or not, you're rocky. Just keep breathin', and bring the kids to the basement doorway. I can do this without you."
I grabbed mattresses and pulled them, kids and all, toward the basement. I was already recuperating enough to wonder how long the basement air would last when we were sealed in. If only we had a column of clean air to draw from—the chimney! 
Spot was awake and curious. I settled him with a pat and a "stay," and hurried to where Ern was folding thin metal tabs back on the underside of my furnace air intake box. "I know why the fallout's worse near my desk, Ern," I said, not wanting to say it. "We should've blocked the chimney at the top while we could still get to it."
Shar, holding a segment of air pipe ready, frowned and then understood. "Of course! The dust box at the foot of the chimney is right outside the foundation near your desk. A little fallout is dropping straight down the chimney. It can't be much."
"Enough, though," Ern grunted. "Nothing we can do about it right now except stay away from that part of the basement. Here, hon; try it now."
She thrust the air pipe past the bent tabs; let Ern tape it in place. She said, "Let's hope the furnace filter's a good one."
It wasn't, but we wouldn't learn that for another fifteen minutes.
 
Our primitive air pipe looked like hell, but lying along the floor from stairwell to tunnel entrance, it looked like salvation, too. Ern finished taping a square of cardboard over the outside "exhaust" piece of mailing tube protruding from the pump and lifted the handle atop the bellows.
The whole thing tried to lift. "Wedge it down for me," he said and pulled again. The box heaved a mighty sigh as its top came up, the polyfilm unwrinkling at its full extension, and then Ern pushed down. I heard a clack inside the bellows—that cardboard flapper operating, the simplest kind of valve you can make.
But more important, a solid whooosh emerged from the exhaust tube, its flapper flying up until Ern started another intake cycle. He kept lifting and shoving for a minute or more, and squatting there in the tunnel, we could not mistake the change in the air quality.
Ern saw the tears of relief in Shar's eyes. "Hon, get something to wedge this bellows box in place; takes more force to lift it than I thought, but it's farting nearly two cubic feet of fresh air every time it cycles. Where are you going, Harve?"
"Not far, that's for sure," I said instead of telling him. I wanted to use the fallout meter to be sure the air was free of fallout.
It wasn't as easy to get a static charge transferred to the foil leaves as it looked. When I touched the uninsulated end of the charging wire, the foil lost some of its charge. I tried again, and after several fumble-fingered tries I had the foil-leaf capacitor properly charged up.
All these goddamn details! They were driving me around the bend. But my brother-in-law had known details that let him build a high-volume bellows pump from scratch, and in an hour. My flibbertigibbet sis had saved my very considerable bacon with air pipes made from fucking newspaper, of all things. But I knew some details I didn't like.
Item: I hadn't changed that furnace filter in a year.
Item: The furnace filter drew air from a standpipe buried in the wall, which poked up through my roof.
Item: Ern's bellows pump sucked so hard you could see the air pipes flexing, even with the cruciform stiffeners inside them. Would it also suck fallout particles in sideways under the raincap on my roof?
Item: If it did, would the dirty furnace filter trap them?
 
I found out a few minutes later, eyeing the fallout meter in front of the bellows exhaust. "Stop the damn pump, Ern," I said.
He'd worked up a sweat. "Gladly. You want to take a turn?"
"No. The meter is reading over thirty rems an hour. We're sucking fallout in past the filter."
"Oh dear God," Shar moaned, and covered the sleeping body of Lance with her own.
 
In the glow of Shar's flashlight I took another reading just inside the tunnel, aware of Ern's eyes on me and of our mutual exhaustion. From many nights of stakeouts, waiting for some bail jumper to poke his nose up, I knew you felt most like cashing it all in when your body was at its lowest ebb. "Twelve rems now, maybe just residual from what we pulled in through the filter," I said, as chipper as possible. I went to the door, fanned it back and forth a few times, then saw the obvious and untaped the air pipe halfway across the floor. "This damn basement must have six or seven thousand cubic feet of air," I growled. "Try pumping again."
Shar saw her husband trying to rise and pushed him back; knelt at the bellows as if venerating it—and why not?—then cycled it slowly. Noting with regret that the old LP record Ern had chosen to generate a static charge was my rare old ten-inch Tom Lehrer album, I recharged the meter again and waited a long time to get my reading. We were too tired to cheer when I concluded that we were taking only two or three rems an hour lying in the tunnel, its door open only enough to admit the airpipe, drawing air from the basement.
I flicked the flashlight off. "We just may make it through," I said.
Ern, almost dreamily: "I've been thinking. The dose we take is cumulative, but that fallout couldn't have reached us much before eleven or so. Maybe we took ten rems before we got to the tunnel, but we haven't taken over a few more in here. Then another five or so in the basement, another couple while pumping shit through your lousy furnace filter—I'm sorry, Harve, and anyway it was my own idea—and I come up with a grand total of less than twenty rems. We have a fighting chance to pull through."
"Unless we run out of air," I reminded him.
"Bubba," panted Shar in the darkness near me, "I am going to—pull every single hair—out of your body." Thirty-five years before, that had been her darkest threat to a brother twice her size. I started to chuckle and heard Ern's soft laugh warming me, and we squeezed that moment of merriment dry.
Sometime after one A.M. I took over the pumping chores. We hadn't set up any official sequence, but when a cautious whisk of the flashlight beam told me Shar and Ern were both asleep, I decided they needed it. I pumped the bellows every ten seconds and rested in between, and figured after four hundred cycles that an hour had passed. Then I roused Kate, calmed her sudden outbreak of fear; told her we were going to make it if she would do three hundred slow pumps of this bizarre gadget before waking Cammie to take her place.
"And who does Cammie wake?"
"Me," I said.
After a moment's thought in the blackness she said, "That won't do, boss. If anybody plays the sacrificial lamb now, we can all be sorry later. And," she said teasingly but with damning accuracy, "you're the one dude in this menagerie that nobody can lift if he collapses. Now we'll try it again: Cammie wakes who?"
"Her old man," I said, and laid my hand on her shoulder before I thought about it.
I think she said, "Thanks," but I was already drifting away to Lilliput, where, according to my synapses, evil homunculi amused themselves by driving pickaxes between my vertebrae for the next few hours.
 
 
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