Thunder and Roses Read online

  Pete Mawser grunted and forced his thoughts away from the drifting, poisonous fragments of a blasted Liberty. Hate was first. Hate was ubiquitous, like the increasing blue glow in the air at night, like the tension that hung over the base.

  Gunfire crackled sporadically far to the right, swept nearer. Pete stepped out of the street and made for a parked ten-wheeler. There’s a lot of cover in and around a ten-wheeler.

  There was a Wac sitting on the short running-board.

  At the corner a stocky figure backed into the intersection. The man carried a tommy gun in his arms, and he was swinging to and fro with the gentle, wavering motion of a weathervane. He staggered toward them, his gun muzzle hunting. Someone fired from a building and the man swiveled and blasted wildly at the sound.

  “He’s—blind,” said Pete Mawser, and added, “He ought to be,” looking at the tattered face.

  A siren keened. An armored jeep slewed into the street. The full-throated roar of a brace of .50-caliber machine guns put a swift and shocking end to the incident.

  “Poor crazy kid,” Pete said softly. “That’s the fourth I’ve seen today.” He looked down at the Wac. She was smiling.

  “Hey!”

  “Hello, Sarge.” She must have identified him before, because now she did not raise her eyes or her voice. “What happened?”

  “You know what happened. Some kid got tired of having nothing to fight and nowhere to run to. What’s the matter with you?”

  “No,” she said. “I don’t mean that.” At last she looked up at him. “I mean all of this. I can’t seem to remember.”

  “You … well, gee, it’s not easy to forget. We got hit. We got hit everywhere at once. All the big cities are gone. We got it from both sides. We got too much. The air is becoming radioactive. We’ll all—” He checked himself. She didn’t know. She’d forgotten. There was nowhere to escape to, and she’d escaped inside herself, right here. Why tell her about it? Why tell her that everyone was going to die? Why tell her that other, shameful thing: that we hadn’t struck back?

  But she wasn’t listening. She was still looking at him. Her eyes were not quite straight. One held his but the other was slightly shifted and seemed to be looking at his temples. She was smiling again. When his voice trailed off she didn’t prompt him. Slowly he moved away. She did not turn her head, but kept looking up at where he had been, smiling a little. He turned away, wanting to run, walking fast.

  (How long can a guy hold out? When you’re in the Army they try to make you be like everybody else. What do you do when everybody else is cracking up?)

  He blanked out the mental picture of himself as the last one left sane. He’d followed that one through before. It always led to the conclusion that it would be better to be one of the first. He wasn’t ready for that yet.

  Then he blanked that out, too. Every time he said to himself that he wasn’t ready for that yet, something within him asked, “Why not?” and he never seemed to have an answer ready.

  (How long could a guy hold out?)

  He climbed the steps of the QM Central and went inside.

  There was nobody at the reception switchboard. It didn’t matter. Messages were carried by guys in jeeps, or on motorcycles. The Base Command was not insisting that anybody stick to a sitting job these days. Ten desk men would crack up for every one on a jeep, or on the soul-sweat squads. Pete made up his mind to put in a little stretch on a squad tomorrow. Do him good. He just hoped that this time the adjutant wouldn’t burst into tears in the middle of the parade ground. You could keep your mind on the manual of arms just fine until something like that happened.

  He bumped into Sonny Weisefreund in the barracks corridor. The tech’s round young face was as cheerful as ever. He was naked and glowing, and had a towel thrown over his shoulder.

  “Hi, Sonny. Is there plenty of hot water?”

  “Why not?” grinned Sonny. Pete grinned back, cursing inwardly. Could anybody say anything about anything at all without one of these reminders? Sure there was hot water. The QM barracks had hot water for three hundred men. There were three dozen left. Men dead, men gone to the hills, men locked up so they wouldn’t—

  “Starr Anthim’s doing a show tonight.”

  “Yeah. Tuesday night. Not funny, Pete. Don’t you know there’s a war—”

  “No kidding,” Pete said swiftly. “She’s here—right here on the base.”

  Sonny’s face was joyful. “Gee.” He pulled the towel off his shoulder and tied it around his waist. “Starr Anthim here! Where are they going to put on the show?”

  “HQ, I imagine. Video only. You know about public gatherings.” And a good thing, too, he thought. Put on an in-person show, and some torn-up GI would crack during one of her numbers. He himself would get plenty mad over a thing like that—mad enough to do something about it then and there. And there would probably be a hundred and fifty or more like him, going raving mad because someone had spoiled a Starr Anthim show. That would be a dandy little shambles for her to put in her memory book.

  “How’d she happen to come here, Pete?”

  “Drifted in on the last gasp of a busted-up Navy helicopter.”

  “Yeah, but why?”

  “Search me. Get your head out of that gift horse’s mouth.”

  He went into the washroom, smiling and glad that he still could. He undressed and put his neatly folded clothes down on a bench. There were a soap wrapper and an empty toothpaste tube lying near the wall. He went and picked them up and put them in the catchall. He took the mop which leaned against the partition and mopped the floor where Sonny had splashed after shaving. Got to keep things squared away. He might say something if it were anyone else but Sonny. But Sonny wasn’t cracking up. Sonny always had been like that. Look there. Left his razor out again.

  Pete started his shower, meticulously adjusting the valves until the pressure and temperature exactly suited him. He didn’t do anything slapdash these days. There was so much to feel, and taste, and see now. The impact of water on his skin, the smell of soap, the consciousness of light and heat, the very pressure of standing on the soles of his feet—he wondered vaguely how the slow increase of radioactivity in the air, as the nitrogen transmuted to Carbon Fourteen, would affect him if he kept carefully healthy in every way. What happens first? Do you go blind? Headaches, maybe? Perhaps you lose your appetite. Or maybe you get tired all the time.

  Why not go look it up?

  On the other hand, why bother? Only a very small percentage of the men would die of radioactive poisoning. There were too many other things that killed more quickly, which was probably just as well. That razor, for example. It lay gleaming in a sunbeam, curved and clean in the yellow light. Sonny’s father and grandfather had used it, or so he said, and it was his pride and joy.

  Pete turned his back on it and soaped under his arms, concentrating on the tiny kisses of bursting bubbles. In the midst of a recurrence of disgust at himself for thinking so often of death, a staggering truth struck him. He did not think of such things because he was morbid, after all! It was the very familiarity of things that brought death-thoughts. It was either “I shall never do this again” or “This is one of the last times I shall do this.” You might devote yourself completely to doing things in different ways, he thought madly. You might crawl across the floor this time, and next time walk across on your hands. You might skip dinner tonight, and have a snack at two in the morning instead, and eat grass for breakfast.

  But you had to breathe. Your heart had to beat. You’d sweat and you’d shiver, the same as always. You couldn’t get away from that. When those things happened, they would remind you. Your heart wouldn’t beat out its wunklunk, wunklunk any more. It would go one-less, one-less, until it yelled and yammered in your ears and you had to make it stop.

  Terrific polish on that razor.

  And your breath would go on, same as before. You could sidle through this door, back through the next one and the one after, and figure out a totally
new way to go through the one after that, but your breath would keep on sliding in and out of your nostrils like a razor going through whiskers, making a sound like a razor being stropped.

  Sonny came in. Pete soaped his hair. Sonny picked up the razor and stood looking at it. Pete watched him, soap ran into his eye, he swore, and Sonny jumped.

  “What are you looking at, Sonny? Didn’t you ever see it before?”

  “Oh, sure. Sure. I was just—” He shut the razor, opened it, flashed light from its blade, shut it again. “I’m tired of using this, Pete. I’m going to get rid of it. Want it?”

  Want it? In his foot locker, maybe. Under his pillow. “Thanks no, Sonny. Couldn’t use it.”

  “I like safety razors,” Sonny mumbled. “Electrics, even better. What are we going to do with it?”

  “Throw it in the … no.” Pete pictured the razor turning end over end in the air, half open, gleaming in the maw of the catchall. “Throw it out the—” No. Curving out into the long grass. You might want it. You might crawl around in the moonlight looking for it. You might find it.

  “I guess maybe I’ll break it up.”

  “No,” Pete said. “The pieces—” Sharp little pieces. Hollow-ground fragments. “I’ll think of something. Wait’ll I get dressed.”

  He washed briskly, toweled, while Sonny stood looking at the razor. It was a blade now, and if you broke it, there would be shards and glittering splinters, still razor sharp. You could slap its edge into an emery wheel and grind it away, and somebody could find it and put another edge on it because it was so obviously a razor, a fine steel razor, one that would slice so—“I know. The laboratory. We’ll get rid of it,” Pete said confidently.

  He stepped into his clothes, and together they went to the laboratory wing. It was very quiet there. Their voices echoed.

  “One of the ovens,” said Pete, reaching for the razor.

  “Bake ovens? You’re crazy!”

  Pete chuckled. “You don’t know this place, do you? Like everything else on the base, there was a lot more went on here than most people knew about. They kept calling it the bake shop. Well, it was research headquarters for new high-nutrient flours. But there’s lots else here. We tested utensils and designed beet peelers and all sorts of things like that. There’s an electric furnace in here that—” He pushed open a door.

  They crossed a long, quiet, cluttered room to the thermal equipment. “We can do everything here from annealing glass, through glazing ceramics, to finding the melting point of frying pans.” He clicked a switch tentatively. A pilot light glowed. He swung open a small, heavy door and set the razor inside. “Kiss it good-bye. In twenty minutes it’ll be a puddle.”

  “I want to see that,” said Sonny. “Can I look around until it’s cooked?”

  “Why not?”

  (Everybody around here always said “Why not?”)

  They walked through the laboratories. Beautifully equipped, they were, and too quiet. Once they passed a major who was bent over a complex electronic hook-up on one of the benches. He was watching a little amber light flicker, and he did not return their salute. They tiptoed past him, feeling awed at his absorption, envying it. They saw the models of the automatic kneaders, the vitaminizers, the remote-signal thermostats and timers and controls.

  “What’s in there?”

  “I dunno. I’m over the edge of my territory. I don’t think there’s anybody left for this section. They were mostly mechanical and electronic theoreticians. The only thing I know about them is that if we ever needed anything in the way of tools, meters, or equipment, they had it or something better, and if we ever got real bright and figured out a startling new idea, they’d already built it and junked it a month ago. Hey!”

  Sonny followed the pointing hand. “What?”

  “That wall section. It’s loose, or … well, what do you know?”

  He pushed at the section of wall, which was very slightly out of line. There was a dark space beyond.

  “What’s in there?”

  “Nothing, or some semiprivate hush-hush job. These guys used to get away with murder.”

  Sonny said, with an uncharacteristic flash of irony, “Isn’t that the Army theoretician’s business?”

  Cautiously they peered in, then entered.

  “Wh … hey! The door!”

  It swung swiftly and quietly shut. The soft click of the latch was accompanied by a blaze of light.

  The room was small and windowless. It contained machinery—a “trickle” charger, a bank of storage batteries, an electric-powered dynamo, two small self-starting gas-driven light plants and a Diesel complete with sealed compressed-air starting cylinders. In the corner was a relay rack with its panel-bolts spot-welded. Protruding from it was a red-top lever. Nothing was labeled.

  They looked at the equipment wordlessly for a time and then Sonny said, “Somebody wanted to make awful sure he had power for something.”

  “Now, I wonder what—” Pete walked over to the relay rack. He looked at the lever without touching it. It was wired up; behind the handle, on the wire, was a folded tag. He opened it cautiously. “To be used only on specific orders of the Commanding Officer.”

  “Give it a yank and see what happens.”

  Something clicked behind them. They whirled. “What was that?”

  “Seemed to come from that rig by the door.”

  They approached it cautiously. There was a spring-loaded solenoid attached to a bar which was hinged to drop across the inside of the secret door, where it would fit into steel gudgeons on the panel.

  It clicked again. “A Geiger,” said Pete disgustedly.

  “Now why,” mused Sonny, “would they design a door to stay locked unless the general radioactivity went beyond a certain point? That’s what it is. See the relays? And the overload switch there? And this?”

  “It has a manual lock, too,” Pete pointed out. The counter clicked again. “Let’s get out of here. I got one of those things built into my head these days.”

  The door opened easily. They went out, closing it behind them. The keyhole was cleverly concealed in the crack between two boards.

  They were silent as they made their way back to the QM labs. The small thrill of violation was gone and, for Pete Mawser at least, the hate was back, that and the shame. A few short weeks before, this base had been a part of the finest country on earth. There was a lot of work here that was secret, and a lot that was such purely progressive and unapplied research that it would be in the way anywhere else but in this quiet wilderness.

  Sweat stood out on his forehead. They hadn’t struck back at their murderers! It was quite well known that there were launching sites all over the country, in secret caches far from any base or murdered city. Why must they sit here waiting to die, only to let the enemy—“enemies” was more like it—take over the continent when it was safe again?

  He smiled grimly. One small consolation. They’d hit too hard: that was a certainty. Probably each of the attackers underestimated what the other would throw. The result—a spreading transmutation of nitrogen into deadly Carbon Fourteen. The effects would not be limited to the continent. What ghastly long-range effect the muted radioactivity would have on the overseas enemies was something that no one alive today could know.

  Back at the furnace, Pete glanced at the temperature dial, then kicked the latch control. The pilot winked out and then the door swung open. They blinked and started back from the raging heat within, then bent and peered. The razor was gone. A pool of brilliance lay on the floor of the compartment.

  “Ain’t much left. Most of it oxidized away,” Pete grunted.

  They stood together for a time with their faces lit by that small shimmering ruin. Later, as they walked back to the barracks, Sonny broke his long silence with a sigh. “I’m glad we did that, Pete. I’m awful glad we did that.”

  At a quarter to eight they were waiting before the combination console in the barracks. All hands except Pete and Sonny and a wiry-h
aired, thick-set corporal named Bonze had elected to see the show on the big screen in the mess hall. The reception was better there, of course, but, as Bonze put it, “you don’t get close enough in a big place like that.”

  “I hope she’s the same,” said Sonny, half to himself.

  Why should she be? thought Pete morosely as he turned on the set and watched the screen begin to glow. There were many more of the golden speckles that had killed reception for the past two weeks. Why should anything be the same, ever again?

  He fought a sudden temptation to kick the set to pieces. It, and Starr Anthim, were part of something that was dead. The country was dead, a real country—prosperous, sprawling, laughing, grabbing, growing and changing, leprous in spots with poverty and injustice, but healthy enough to overcome any ill. He wondered how the murderers would like it. They were welcome to it, now. Nowhere to go. No one to fight. That was true for every soul on earth now.

  “You hope she’s the same,” he muttered.

  “The show, I mean,” said Sonny mildly. “I’d like to just sit here and have it like … like—”

  Oh, thought Pete mistily. Oh—that. Somewhere to go, that’s what it is, for a few minutes. “I know,” he said, all the harshness gone from his voice.

  Noise receded from the audio as the carrier swept in. The light on the screen swirled and steadied into a diamond pattern. Pete adjusted the focus, chromic balance, and intensity. “Turn out the lights, Bonze. I don’t want to see anything but Starr Anthim.”

  It was the same, at first. Starr Anthim had never used the usual fanfares, fade-ins, color, and clamor of her contemporaries. A black screen, then click, a blaze of gold. It was all there, in focus; tremendously intense, it did not change. Rather, the eye changed to take it in. She never moved for seconds after she came on; she was there, a portrait, a still face and a white throat. Her eyes were open and sleeping. Her face was alive and still.

  Then, in the eyes which seemed green but were blue flecked with gold, an awareness seemed to gather, and they came awake. Only then was it noticeable that her lips were parted. Something in the eyes made the lips be seen, though nothing moved yet. Not until she bent her head slowly, so that some of the gold flecks seemed captured in the golden brows. The eyes were not, then, looking out at an audience. They were looking at me, and at me, and at ME.