Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang Read online

  “But why would Burke go for it? You’ve never voted for him in a single campaign in his life.”

  “Told him we’d dig out a lot of stuff we’ve been sitting on, support his opposition. If he was a baboon, we’d support him, and there’s a lot of family these days, David. A heap of family.”

  “Well, hats off,” David said, still not fully believing it. “You giving up your practice to go into research?” he asked Walt. His uncle nodded. David drained his cup of eggnog.

  “David,” Walt said quietly, “we want to hire you.”

  He looked up quickly. “Why? I’m not into medical research.”

  “I know what your specialty is,” Walt said, still very quietly. “We want you for a consultant, and later on to head a department of research.”

  “But I haven’t even finished my thesis yet,” David said, and he felt as if he had stumbled into a pot party.

  “You’ll do another year of donkey work for Selnick and eventually you’ll write the thesis, a bit here, a dab there. You could write it in a month, couldn’t you, if you had time?” David nodded reluctantly. “I know,” Walt said, smiling faintly. “You think you’re being asked to give up a lifetime career for a pipe dream.” There was no trace of a smile when he added, “But, David, we believe that lifetime won’t be more than two to four years at the very most.”

  Chapter 2

  David looked from his uncle to his father, to the other uncles and cousins in the room, and finally to his grandfather. He shook his head helplessly. “That’s crazy. What are you talking about?”

  Grandfather Sumner let out his breath explosively. He was a large man with a massive chest and great bulging biceps. His hands were big enough to carry a basketball in each. But it was his head that was his most striking feature. It was the head of a giant, and although he had farmed for many years, and later overseen the others who did it for him, he had found time to read more extensively than anyone else that David knew. There was no book, except the contemporary best sellers, that anyone could mention that he wasn’t aware of, or hadn’t read. And he remembered what he read. His library was better than most public libraries.

  Now he leaned forward and said, “You listen to me, David. You listen hard. I’m telling you what the goddamn government doesn’t dare admit yet. We’re on the first downslope of a slide that is going to plummet this economy, and that of every other nation on earth, to a depth that they never dreamed of.

  “I know the signs, David. The pollution’s catching up to us faster than anyone knows. There’s more radiation in the atmosphere than there’s been since Hiroshima — French tests, China’s tests. Leaks. God knows where all of it’s coming from. We reached zero population growth a couple of years ago, but, David, we were trying, and other nations are getting there too, and they aren’t trying. There’s famine in one-fourth of the world right now. Not ten years from now, not six months from now. The famines are here and they’ve been here for three, four years already, and they’re getting worse. There’re more diseases than there’s ever been since the good Lord sent the plagues to visit the Egyptians. And they’re plagues that we don’t know anything about.

  “There’s more drought and more flooding than there’s ever been. England’s changing into a desert, the bogs and moors are drying up. Entire species of fish are gone, just damn gone, and in only a year or two. The anchovies are gone. The codfish industry is gone. The cod they are catching are diseased, unfit to use. There’s no fishing off the west coast of the Americas.

  “Every damn protein crop on earth has some sort of blight that gets worse and worse. Corn blight. Wheat rust. Soybean blight. We’re restricting our exports of food now, and next year we’ll stop them altogether. We’re having shortages no one ever dreamed of. Tin, copper, aluminum, paper. Chlorine, by God! And what do you think will happen in the world when we suddenly can’t even purify our drinking water?”

  His face was darkening as he spoke, and he was getting angrier and angrier, directing his unanswerable questions to David, who stared at him with nothing at all to say.

  “And they don’t know what to do about any of it,” his grandfather went on. “No more than the dinosaurs knew how to stop their own extinction. We’ve changed the photochemical reactions of our own atmosphere, and we can’t adapt to the new radiations fast enough to survive! There have been hints here and there that this is a major concern, but who listens? The damn fools will lay each and every catastrophe at the foot of a local condition and turn their backs on the fact that this is global, until it’s too late to do anything.”

  “But if it’s what you think, what could they do?” David asked, looking to Dr. Walt for support and finding none.

  “Turn off the factories, ground the airplanes, stop the mining, junk the cars. But they won’t, and even if they did, it would still be a catastrophe. It’s going to break wide open. Within the next couple of years, David, it’s going to break.” He drank his eggnog then and put the crystal cup down hard. David jumped at the noise.

  “There’s going to be the biggest bust since man began scratching marks on rocks, that’s what! And we’re getting ready for it! I’m getting ready for it! We’ve got the land and we’ve got the men to farm it, and we’ll get our hospital and we’ll do research in ways to keep our animals and our people alive, and when the world goes into a tailspin we’ll be alive and when it starves we’ll be eating.”

  Suddenly he stopped and studied David with his eyes narrowed. “I said you’d leave here convinced that we’ve all gone mad. But you’ll be back, David, my boy. You’ll be back before the dogwoods bloom, because you’ll see the signs.”

  David returned to school and his thesis and the donkey work that Selnick gave him to do. Celia didn’t write, and he had no address for her. In response to his questions his mother admitted that no one had heard from her. In February in retaliation for the food embargo, Japan passed trade restrictions that made further United States trade with her impossible. Japan and China signed a mutual aid treaty. In March, Japan seized the Philippines, with their fields of rice, and China resumed its long-dormant trusteeship over the Indochina peninsula, with the rice paddies of Cambodia and Vietnam.

  Cholera struck in Rome, Los Angeles, Galveston, and Savannah. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan, and other Arab-bloc nations issued an ultimatum: the United States must guarantee a yearly ration of wheat to the Arab bloc and discontinue all aid to the state of Israel or there would be no oil for the United States or Europe. They refused to believe the United States could not meet their demands. International travel restrictions were imposed immediately, and the government, by presidential decree, formed a new department with cabinet status: the Bureau of Information.

  The redbuds were hazy blurs of pink against the clear, May-softened sky when David returned home. He stopped by his house only long enough to change his clothes and get rid of his boxes of college mementos before he drove out to the Sumner farm, where Walt was staying while he oversaw the construction of his hospital.

  Walt had an office downstairs. It was a clutter of books, notebooks, blueprints, correspondence. He greeted David as if he hadn’t been away at all. “Look,” he said. “This research of Semple and Frerrer, what do you know about it? The first generation of cloned mice showed no deviation, no variation in viability or potency, nor did the second or third, but with the fourth the viability decreased sharply. And there was a steady, and irreversible, slide to extinction. Why?”

  David sat down hard and stared at Walt. “How did you get that?”

  “Vlasic,” Walt said. “We went to med school together. He went on in one direction, I in another. We’ve corresponded all these years. I asked him.”

  “You know his work?”

  “Yes. His rhesus monkeys show the same decline during the fourth generation, and on to extinction.”

  “It isn’t just like that,” David said. “He had to discontinue his work last year — no funds. So we don’t know the life expectancies of the la
ter strains. But the decline starts in the third clone generation, a decline of potency. He was breeding each clone generation sexually, testing the offspring for normalcy. The third clone generation had only twenty-five percent potency. The sexually reproduced offspring started with that same percentage, and, in fact, potency dropped until the fifth generation of sexually reproduced offspring, and then it started to climb back up and presumably would have reached normalcy again.”

  Walt was watching him closely, nodding now and then. David went on. “That was the clone-three strain. With the clone-four strain there was a drastic change. Some abnormalities were present, and life expectancy was down seventeen percent. The abnormals were all sterile. Potency was generally down to forty-eight percent. It was downhill all the way with each sexually reproduced generation. By the fifth generation no offspring survived longer than an hour or two. So much for clone-four strain. Cloning the fours was worse. Clone-five strain had gross abnormalities, and they were all sterile. Life-expectancy figures were not completed. There was no clone-six strain. None survived.”

  “A dead end,” Walt said. He indicated a stack of magazines and extracts. “I had hoped that they were out of date, that there were newer methods, perhaps, or an error had been found in their figures. It’s the third generation that is the turning point then?”

  David shrugged. “My information could be out of date. I know Vlasic stopped last year, but Semple and Frerrer are still at it, or were last month. They may have something newer than I know. You’re thinking of livestock?”

  “Of course. You know the rumors? They’re just not breeding well. No figures are available, but, hell, we have our own livestock. They’re down by half.”

  “I heard something. Denied by the Bureau of Information, I believe.”

  “It’s true,” Walt said soberly.

  “They must be working on this line,” David said. “Someone must be working on it.”

  “If they are, no one’s telling us about it,” Walt said. He laughed bitterly and stood up.

  “Can you get materials for the hospital?” David asked.

  “For now. We’re rushing it like there’s no tomorrow, naturally. And we’re not worrying about money right now. We’ll have things that we won’t know what to do with, but I thought it would be better to order everything I can think of than to find out next year that what we really need isn’t available.”

  David went to the window and looked at the farm; the green was well established by now, spring would give way to summer without a pause and the corn would be shiny, silky green in the fields. Just like always. “Let me have a look at your lab equipment orders, and the stuff that’s been delivered already,” he said. “Then let’s see if we can wrangle me travel clearance out to the coast. I’ll talk to Semple; I’ve met him a few times. If anyone’s doing anything, it’s that team.”

  “What is Selnick working on?”

  “Nothing. He lost his grant, his students were sent packing.” David grinned at his uncle suddenly. “Look, up on the hill, you can see a dogwood ready to burst open. Some of the blooms are already showing.”

  Chapter 3

  David was bone tired, every muscle seemed to ache at once, and his head was throbbing. For nine days he had been on the go, to the coast, to Harvard, to Washington, and now he wanted nothing more than to sleep, even if the world ground to a stop while he was unaware. He had taken a train from Washington to Richmond, and there, unable to rent a car, or buy gasoline if a car had been available, he had stolen a bicycle and pedaled the rest of the way. He never realized his legs could ache so much.

  “You’re sure that bunch in Washington won’t be able to get a hearing?” Grandfather Sumner asked.

  “No one wants to hear the Jeremiahs,” David said. Selnick had been one of the group, and he had talked to David briefly. The government had to admit the seriousness of the coming catastrophe, had to take strict measures to avert it, or at least alleviate it, but instead, the government chose to paint glowing pictures of the coming upturn that would be apparent by fall. During the next six months those with sense and money would buy everything they could to see them through, because after that period of grace there would be nothing to buy.

  “Selnick says we should offer to buy his equipment. The school will jump at the chance to unload it right now. Cheap.” David laughed. “Cheap. A quarter of a million possibly.”

  “Make the offer,” Grandfather Sumner said brusquely. And Walt nodded thoughtfully.

  David stood up shakily and shook his head. He waved at them and went off to his bed.

  People still went to work. The factories were still producing, not as much, and none of the nonessentials, but they were converting to coal as fast as possible. He thought about the darkened cities, the fleets of trucks rusting, the corn and wheat rotting in the fields. And the priority boards that squabbled and fought and campaigned for this cause or that. It was a long time before his twitching muscles relaxed enough for him to lie quietly, and a longer time before he could relax his mind enough to sleep.

  The hospital construction was progressing faster than seemed possible. There were two shifts at work; again a case of damn-the-cost. Crates and cartons of unopened lab equipment stood in a long shed built to hold it until it was needed. David went to work in a makeshift laboratory trying to replicate Frerrer’s and Semple’s tests. And in early July, Harry Vlasic arrived at the farm. He was short, fat, near-sighted, and short-tempered. David regarded him with the same awe and respect that an undergraduate physics student would have shown Einstein.

  “All right,” Vlasic said. “The corn crop has failed, as predicted. Monoculture! Bah! They’ll save sixty percent of the wheat, no more than that. This winter, hah, just wait until winter! Now where is the cave?”

  They took him to the cave entrance, which was just over a hundred yards from the hospital. Inside the cave they used lanterns. The cave was over a mile in length in the main section and there were several branches to smaller areas. Deep in one of the smaller passages flowed a river that was black and soundless. Spring water, good water. Vlasic nodded again and again. When they finished the cave tour he was still nodding. “It’s good,” he said. “It’ll work. The laboratories go in there, underground passage from the hospital, safe from contamination. Good.”

  They worked sixteen hours a day that summer and into the fall. In October the first wave of flu swept the country, worse than the outbreak of 1917-1918. In November a new illness appeared, and here and there it was whispered that it was plague, but the government Bureau of Information said it was flu. Grandfather Sumner died in November. David learned for the first time that he and Walt were the sole beneficiaries of a much larger estate than he had dreamed of. And the estate was in cash. Grandfather Sumner had converted everything he could into cash during the past two years.

  In December the members of the family began to arrive, leaving the towns and villages and cities scattered throughout the valley to take up residence in the hospital and staff buildings. Rationing, black markets, inflation, and looting had turned the cities into battle mounds. And the government was freezing all assets of every business — nothing could be bought or sold without approval. The army was occupying the buildings, and government employees were overseeing the strict rationing that had been imposed.

  The family brought their stocks with them. Jeremy Streit brought his hardware merchandise in four truckloads. Eddie Beauchamp brought his dental equipment. David’s father brought all that he could from his department store. The family had diversified, and there were representative supplies from almost every conceivable area of business and professional endeavor.

  With the failure of radio and television communication, there was no way for the government to cope with the rising panic. Martial law was declared on December 28. Six months too late.

  There was no child left under eight years of age when the spring rains came, and the original 319 people who had come to the upper valley had dwindled to 201. I
n the cities the toll had been much higher.

  David studied the fetal pig he was getting ready to dissect. It was wrinkled and desiccated, its bones too soft, its lymph glands lumpy, hard. Why? Why did the fourth generation decline? Harry Vlasic came to watch briefly, then walked away, his head bowed in thought. Not even he could come up with any answers, David thought, almost with satisfaction.

  That night David, Walt, and Vlasic met and went over it all again. They had enough livestock to feed the two hundred people for a long time, through cloning and sexual breeding of the third generation. They could clone up to four hundred animals at a time. Chickens, swine, cattle. But if the livestock all became sterile, as seemed indicated, then the food supply was limited.

  Watching the two older men, David knew that they were purposely skirting the other question. If the people also became sterile, how long would they need a continuing supply of food? He said, “We should isolate a strain of sterile mice, clone them, and test for the reemergence of fertility with each new generation of clones.”

  Vlasic frowned and shook his head. “If we had a dozen undergraduate students, perhaps,” he said drily.

  “We have to know,” David said, feeling hot suddenly. “You’re both acting like this is just a five-year emergency plan to tide us over a bad few years. What if it isn’t that at all? Whatever is causing the sterility is present in all the animals. We have to know.”

  Walt looked at David briefly and said, “We don’t have the time or the facilities to do any research like that.”

  “That’s a lie,” David said flatly. “We can generate all the electricity we can use, more than enough power. We have equipment we haven’t even unloaded yet. . . .”