The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Seventh Annual Collection Read online

  That was crisis time, there and then. I don’t know how long I stood beside that phone kiosk while the battle raged. At one point several busloads of Amish families went by, probably headed for relatives in Ohio; they stared out, faces blank and stony; for them too it was the end of the world. The wind had only held SSW a little while before shifting to southwest, but that was long enough.

  Finally I got back into the car, turned it around, reentered the turnpike by the eastbound ramp, drove back to the roadblock, and found my trooper. He stood still and watched me walk up to him, too beat to show surprise. “Look,” I said, “I’d like to go in and help search for the people that got missed. They must need volunteers. I’m volunteering.”

  Very slowly he nodded. “If that’s what you want. Go on into Harrisburg and talk to somebody there. Get off at the Capitol, there’s a trooper station set up around there somewheres, you’ll see it. Maybe they’ll take you. I’ll radio ahead so they know you’re comin’.” I thanked him and started to leave; he called after me, “Listen up a minute, bud. Later on it might be too late to change your mind. We might be moving people out of York and Harrisburg if the wind shifts again.”

  “I understand,” I called back, and felt him watch for a minute before moving to his car to use the radio.

  In Harrisburg I talked fast and they took me—took me also, at face value, for a youthfully middle-aged man. They issued me a radiation suit, and minimal instructions, and flew me into the contaminated zone along with a batch of other volunteers, a few Quakers and some workers from Three Mile Island.

  We were dropped in Center City, fifteen miles from where I needed to be. They didn’t like to spare any people for the suburbs, but emergency volunteers are hard to control and some of the others were looking for friends or relatives too. In the end they let each of us take a police vehicle with a loudspeaker and told us to make a mad dash for home, then drive back slowly into the city, keeping the siren on and picking up stragglers as we came.

  I’d only made it a little more than halfway home when I ran out of gas. The damned van burned ethanol and I’d been driving some kind of electric or solar car for thirteen years, but even so … I tore off on foot in my radiation suit to find a filling station, looking I’m sure exactly like a space invader in a B-grade flick, trying to run along the deserted street—not deserted enough, though: when I got back with a can of ethanol half an hour later, streaming with sweat and nearly suffocated, the van was gone. Like an idiot I hadn’t taken the keys. I heaved the can into a hedge and started walking.

  I was seven miles from home, give or take half a mile. Just as I set off, the sun came out. I had to pee badly and didn’t know how (or whether) to open the suit, and I was already terribly thirsty.

  That walk was no fun at all. I had to rest a lot. I also had decided that wetting the suit was preferable to the consequences of any alternative I could think of, which made the hike even more unpleasant than it would have been in any case. It was more than three hours from the time I’d left the van when I finally got home. The key was in my pocket but I couldn’t get to it; I ended up breaking my own basement window to get in.

  Eric wasn’t there.

  I knew the house was empty the instant I got inside. In the basement I leaned against the cool wall, overcome with exhaustion and letdown. After a while I fumbled with the suit till something came unfastened, and crawled out of it, drenched and reeking; I left the suit in the basement with all my seed-starting equipment and insect cages and dragged myself on wobbling knees upstairs, shutting the door behind me.

  The kitchen sink was full of water. So were both bathroom sinks and the tub. My feeling of letdown lifted; he’d followed instructions then, that probably meant he’d gotten safely away. Good old Eric. I drank a couple of liters of water from the sink before stripping off my vile clothes and plunging into the full, cool tub. Might as well die clean.

  Almost instantly I went to sleep. When I woke an hour or so later with a stiff neck I took a thorough bath, got dressed again (this time in my “own” clothes, some shorts and a shirt), realized I was famished, and raided the refrigerator for a random sampling of Eric’s abandoned provisions: cold chicken, supermarket bread, a banana, a tomato from the garden. The power was off, but the doors had been kept shut and nothing had spoiled. I drank a can of Eric’s Coke, my first in nearly thirty years. It was delicious. In a cabinet I found a bag of potato chips and ate them all with deliberate relish: exquisite! There were half a dozen boxes of baked beans in there—and pickled herring—and a box of cheese—Irrationally I began to feel terrific, as if the lost chance with Eric were somehow being made up for by his unintended gifts, the last meals I expected ever to eat. I meant to enjoy them, and I did.

  Sated at last, I wandered into my airless bedroom and fell across the bed. Strange as it may sound, I never thought to switch on the transistor, so wholly had I crossed over into a realm governed by the certainty of my own imminent death. I had been fleeing my death for so long that on one level I actually felt relief to believe I could give in to it now, stop twisting and doubling and trying to give it the slip. Nor, still stranger, did I even glance into the garden.

  The house was stifling, must have been shut up for many hours. It had been many hours too since people had been told not to run any more water or flush their toilets, though both of mine were flushed and clean. These things pointed to Eric’s safe escape and relieved my mind of its last burden. I sank like a stone into sleep. When I woke it was dark, and the house was being battered by the amazing racket of the helicopter landing in the little park a block away.

  They’d caught the person who had pinched my van as he was trying to cross the Commodore Barry Bridge into New Jersey. A police van is a conspicuous object to steal, but he’d been offered no alternatives and didn’t mind being apprehended at all, so long as his captors took him out of danger. He’d seen me stop and leave the van, waited till I was gone, then poured fuel from some cans in his landlady’s garage into the tank and taken off, while I’d still been hoofing it up the road. Inside the helmet I hadn’t heard the engine start. It seemed less reasonable to steal the van outright than to beg a lift, but people act oddly when their lives are at stake and that was how he’d chosen to play it—a white man in his fifties, no family, a nightshift worker who had somehow slept through the evacuation. In fact, the very sort of person I’d been sent to pick up. All this I learned later.

  It had taken time to trace the van, and everybody was plenty busy enough without coming to rescue the would-be rescuer, and they didn’t even know my name. But I’d mentioned the name of my development to one of the other volunteers, and its general location near the campus, and eventually they sent the helicopter out to find me. It wasn’t till I was out of my suit again that anybody realized the man they’d come to find had metamorphosed into a woman.

  * * *

  The rest is all aftermath, but I may as well set it down anyway.

  I lived for a month in a refugee camp near Kutztown, Pennsylvania, on land owned by the Rodale Research Center; I chose it for that reason. By month’s end it was obvious that Greater Philadelphia was going to be uninhabitable for years—maybe a decade, maybe more.

  A month to the day after the accident they sighted the returning Hefn ship.

  I took a pretty high dose of radiation. My chances of developing leukemia in fifteen or twenty years aren’t bad at all. However, I don’t expect to be around that long unless I accept the Hefn’s offer (of which more later).

  One day in the camp they paged me, and when I got to the admin tent, who should be standing there in pack, tee shirt, and shorts but Eric Meredith. I’d found out, quite quickly, that he had indeed gone to relatives in Erie with the first wave of the evacuation, and had sent him a letter saying how relieved I was that he’d gotten away safely. I’d mentioned that I would be staying at the Rodale Camp for a while. Eric had come all that way, not to collect his bonus (as I thought at first), but to deliver the contents
of his backpack: a complete printout of the records of my experiment, this season’s preliminary notes on disk, and six seriously overripe cantaloupes containing the seeds of Cucumis melo reticulatus var. Milky Tango, the hybrid melon I’d had the highest hopes for, saved by his quick thinking from the radioactive rain. “I didn’t know how to get the tough disk out of the computer,” he apologized.

  I stared at the bagful of smelly spheres on the table before us with the oddest emotion. For part of a day not long before I’d surrendered, I’d given up my life. By purest luck my life had been restored to me; but I had crossed some psychic boundary that day, and had never crossed back again. And Eric and the experiment both belonged to the time before the accident, when fighting viral diseases had been most of what I cared to do.

  It only took one step to close the distance. I took it, put my arms around that bony, sinewy, beanpole torso and held myself against it for a moment out of time. Eric stood stiff as a tomato stake, and about as responsive, but I didn’t mind. “Eric, do me a favor,” I said, letting go of him and stepping back. “I’ll take half of these, you keep the others. Plant them in your grandparents’ back yard next summer. Finish the experiment for me.”

  A coughing fit made me break off, and Eric unstiffened enough to say, “Are you okay? That cough sounds terrible.”

  “I’m fine now. I had a cold, then bronchitis. Listen: the soil at my place will be contaminated for years, and God knows when I’ll get another yard to grow things in. The college may reorganize, but it hasn’t been decided whether or where. Not in Delaware County, though. Will you be going on down to University Park?”

  He nodded. “Next week. They’re letting us start late.”

  “Good, then you just have time to collect yourself a supply of cucumber beetles. You can expose them to mosaic later if they haven’t already picked it up.” The poor kid was staring, unable to believe what was happening. “I’m perfectly serious. Look: you saved the data and the seed. I was in the house for eight hours or so myself and it never crossed my mind to try to rescue either one.” This was true. The only thing I’d thought to rescue, when the helicopter came, had been my fake penis. “You’ve earned the right to finish the work. But don’t feel you have to, either; the Rodale people will be glad to take over, or a seed company would.”

  “Oh no, I want to! Really!” he protested. “If you don’t that is—but you could make money from this. It isn’t right.”

  “Tell you what. For safety’s sake, let’s have another copy of these records made and print out the ones from this summer. I’ll hang on to half the seed, as I said. If you don’t produce salable results I’ll see that somebody who might gets my copy and the seed; and if you do get results we’ll split the money down the middle. How does that sound?”

  The camp had several notaries. We wrote up an agreement and got one of them to notarize our signatures. I wasn’t even sure it was legal—Eric was only nineteen or twenty—but never mind, I thought, never mind!

  I walked him back to his car. Still bedazzled by the turn of events, he let the window down to say earnestly, “Nobody ever gave me anything this important before. I don’t know what to say.”

  “You gave me something important too.”

  “I did? When? What was it?”

  I thought of trying to tell him just what, thought better of it. “Cold chicken. Potato chips. Baked beans. Coke.”

  It took him a minute to realize what I was talking about, but then he objected, “That’s different! That’s not the same thing at all!”

  “Less different than you know. Think about it, eh?” And then, a bit rashly, “Think about me once in a while.”

  Last month I attended Eric’s graduation from Penn State: Magna cum laude in biology and a graduate fellowship to Cornell. For a boy from the nether regions of academe, not bad at all. Maybe he’ll do with his life what I’d have done with mine if things had been different. Eric’s final proof of Milky Tango’s tolerance to mosaic under a wide variety of growing conditions earned him his classy degree, though he gave me full credit for my own work, to which his was only the capstone—but a beautifully cut and polished capstone, every bit as good as the one I might have cut myself. I wore a long-sleeved shirt to the commencement, too warm for such a sunny day, to cover the Kaposi’s lesions that have spread now over much of my body.

  My own research has taken an unexpected turn.

  Early last summer I donned a radiation suit and went back home to see my abandoned garden and my field trial beds. Everything was a disheartening mess, but that wasn’t what I’d come to see. Eric had ripped loose the Ultramay cover on the Milky Tango beds to harvest those six melons. Remnants of the stuff flapped around me as I knelt to look, imagining his haste and fright as he’d scrabbled frantically among the vines while behind him in the house the printer pipped and pinged. But such thoughts weren’t what I’d come for either.

  The rest of the Milky Tango seedcrop had eventually rotted where it lay, and the seeds had been directly exposed to the elements all these months. I’d been reading a lot about using fast neutrons, X-rays, and gamma rays to induce desirable mutations in plants, including disease resistance, and had begun to wonder what effect the fallout might have had on my own already highly resistant muskmelons. I wanted to know whether any of the accidentally irradiated seed had made it through the winter and germinated, and so did my new bosses at the Rodale Press, who were paying for this expedition. Our Hefn observer was interested too—enough to come along and help.

  Sure enough, there were about two dozen volunteer seedlings growing in the Milky Tango plots. Some leaves showed signs of moderate beetle damage but not enough to set the plants back much. With Godfrey’s help I transplanted each seedling, radioactive soil and all, into its own large peat pot brought along for the purpose. Back at the Research Center we planted the lot of them at a special site set apart from the other trials and waited to see what would happen.

  While we were waiting I got sick. Before that, the eighteen months between the Peach Bottom accident and my illness were my happiest ever.

  When Penn State made the decision to disband the Delaware County Campus, they offered to try to place the tenured faculty at other branches of the system; but by then the Rodale Press had offered me a job. I’d been writing for their magazines for years and knew a number of Rodale editors and writers through correspondence, so it was natural enough that they should think of me when an editorial slot opened up that September at Backyard Researcher magazine, the newest member of the Rodale family of publications.

  I can remember when all this part of Pennsylvania was farmland, and Kutztown a tiny college town with one main street, one bad motel, and one decent restaurant. But high-tech industry like AT&T and Xerox had moved in, changing the character of the area completely. When I came here to live, the Research Center had become a green island in a sea of development. I moved into one of the old farm buildings at the Center and commuted to my job in Emmaus, where the Press was located. Living out at the Center made it easier to keep an eye on my new experimental garden. No more battling with diseases now; the project I devised had to do with increasing yields in several kinds of potatoes. No more hyperpure living, either; the potato chip and I were strangers no longer. No more Companions; we were scattered to the winds, but the new friends I made here knew about my condition. No more celibacy: for a while, one of these friends became my lover.

  When the Hefn returned and decided to take charge of us, they looked around for pockets of sanity and right action in the general balls-up we’d made of things, and so they were interested in the Rodale enterprise and in sustainable agriculture generally—enough to assign us a permanent observer/ advisor, and that was Godfrey. He moved into the farmhouse with me. When I got sick he knew about it; when the lesions appeared he asked about them, and the disease they meant I had. It’s because of Godfrey that the search for a “cure”—fallen on very thin times since the numbers of still-living victims had dropped
below ten thousand—has taken off again.

  It looks pretty promising, actually. They’ve found a way to paralyze the enzyme that the virus uses to replicate in the cell—not like zidovudine and its kindred, which only slowed the enzyme down, but a drug that stops it cold. There’s no way I’d still be alive by the time they finish sanding the side effects off the stuff, not in the natural course of things. But Godfrey’s had another idea.

  You know that, like cucumber beetles, the Hefn hibernate—and that their bodies use chemicals pretty much the same way ours do? Well, Godfrey figures it should be possible to synthesize a drug—using a chipmunk or woodchuck model in conjunction with a Hefn model—that would put the ninety-five-hundred-odd AIDS patients and AB-positives to sleep for a couple of years, until the cure can be perfected. There’s a problem about testing the stuff if we all take the cold sleep, because of course the bosses, the Gafr, won’t let them use animals. So we might be asleep for quite a while—or forever—or be damaged by the procedure. But the Gafr have given the go-ahead, and I’m thinking seriously about it. The Kaposi’s can only be treated effectively with radiation, and I’ve had much more than my fair share of that already. I’ll die of cancer anyway, probably sooner than later; in a month I’ll be forty-nine. But I’m thinking about it. I wish they’d come up with this before, is all.

  I have to tell you something funny. One of my irradiated melon plants turned out to be one hundred percent immune to mosaic! It’s peculiar in other ways that make it useless for commercial purposes at this point, but the Rodale breeders are sure to keep working on improvements. I mentioned before that like all cucurbits melons produce separate male and female flowers, the male flowers bearing the pollen-producing stamens, the female flowers the pistil and ovary. Ordinarily it’s easy to tell which is which, because the ovary behind the female blossom is a large hairy structure and the male flower has nothing behind it but a stem.

  Well, the immune melon bears male and female flowers that look exactly alike! You can’t tell them apart, except by peering closely at the inner structures or tearing off the petals, because the ovary is tiny, and concealed entirely within the flower. The fruit is correspondingly tiny, about the size of a small orange—much too small to appeal to growers, though I’d think home gardeners might raise it as a novelty.