Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang Page 4

  He thought, Walt be damned, promises be damned, secrecy be damned. And he told her about the clones developing under the mountain, in the laboratory deep in the cave.

  Chapter 5

  Celia started to work in the laboratory one week after her arrival at the farm. “It’s the only way I’ll ever get to see you at all,” she said gently when David protested. “I promised Walt that I would work only four hours a day to start. Okay?”

  David took her through the lab the following morning. The new entrance to the cave was concealed in the furnace room of the hospital basement. The door was steel, set in the limestone rock that underlay the area. As soon as they stepped through the doorway, the air was cold and David put a coat about Celia’s shoulders. “We keep them here at all times,” he said, taking a second coat from a wall hanger. “Twice government inspectors have come here, and it might look suspicious if we put them on to go down the cellar. They won’t be back.”

  The passageway was dimly lighted, the floor was smooth. It went four hundred feet to another steel door. This one opened into the first cave chamber, a large, high-domed room. It had been left almost as they had found it, with stalactites and stalagmites on all sides, but now there were many cots, picnic tables and benches, and a row of cooking tables and serving tables. “Our emergency room, for the hot rains,” David said, hurrying her through the echoing room. There was another passage, narrower and tougher than the first. At the end of this passage was the animal experiment room.

  One wall had been cut through and the computer installed, looking grotesquely out of place against a wall of pale pink travertine. In the center of the room were tanks and vats and pipes, all stainless steel and glass. On either side of these were the tanks that held the animal embryos. Celia stared without moving for several moments, then turned to look at David with startled eyes. “How many tanks do you have?”

  “Enough to clone six hundred animals of varying sizes,” he said. “We took a lot of them out, put them in the lab on the other side, and we’re not using all that we have here. We’re afraid our supplies of chemicals will run out, and so far we haven’t come up with alternatives that we can extract from anything at our disposal here.”

  Eddie Beauchamp came from the side of the tanks, jotting figures in a ledger. He grinned at David and Celia. “Slumming?” he asked. He checked his figures against a dial and adjusted it a fraction, and continued down the row checking the other dials, stopping now and again to make a minor adjustment.

  Celia’s eyes questioned David, and he shook his head. Eddie didn’t know what they were doing in the other lab. They walked past the tanks, row after row of them, all sealed, with only needles that moved now and then and the dials on the sides to indicate that there was anything inside. They returned to the corridor. David led her through another doorway, a short passage, then into the second laboratory, this one secured by a lock that he had a key for.

  Walt looked up as they entered, nodded, and turned again to the desk where he was working. Vlasic didn’t even look up. Sarah smiled and hurried past them and sat down before a computer console and began to type. Another woman in the room didn’t seem to be aware that anyone had come in. Hilda. Celia’s aunt. David glanced at Celia, but she was staring wide-eyed at the tanks, and in this room the tanks were glass-fronted. Each was filled with a pale liquid, a yellow so faint that the color seemed almost illusory. Within the tanks, floating in the liquid, were sacs, no larger than small fists. Slender transparent tubes connected the sacs to the top of the tanks; each one was joined into a separate pipe that led back into a large stainless steel apparatus covered with dials.

  Celia walked slowly down the aisle between the tanks, stopped once midway, and didn’t move again for a long time. David took her arm. She was trembling slightly.

  “Are you all right?”

  She nodded. “I . . . it’s a shock, seeing them. I . . . maybe I didn’t quite believe it.” There was a film of perspiration on her face.

  “Better take off the coat now,” David said. “We have to keep it pretty warm in here. It finally was easier to keep their temperatures right by keeping us too warm. The price we pay,” he said, smiling slightly.

  “All the lights? The heat? The computer? You can generate that much electricity?”

  He nodded. “That’ll be our tour tomorrow. Like everything else around here, the generating system has bugs in it. We can store enough power for no longer than six hours, and we just don’t let it go out for more than six hours. Period.”

  “Six hours is a lot. If you stop breathing for six minutes, you’re dead.” With her hands clasped behind her, she stepped closer to the shiny control system at the end of the room. “This isn’t the computer. What is it?”

  “It’s a computer terminal. The computer controls the input of nutrients and oxygen, and the output of toxins. The animal room is on the other side of that wall. Those tanks are linked to it, too. Separate set of systems, but the same machinery.”

  They went through the nursery for the animals, and then the nursery for the human babies. There was the dissection room, several small offices where the scientists could withdraw to work, the stockrooms. In every room except the one where the human clones were being grown, people were working. “They never used a Bunsen burner or a test tube before, but they have become scientists and technicians practically overnight,” David said. “And thank God for that, or it never would have worked. I don’t know what they think we’re doing now, but they don’t ask questions. They just do their jobs.”

  Walt assigned Celia to work under Vlasic. Whenever David looked up to see her in the laboratory, he felt a stab of joy. She increased her workday to six hours. When David fell into bed exhausted after fourteen or sixteen hours, she was there to hold him and love him.

  In August, Avery Handley reported that his shortwave contact in Richmond warned of a band of marauders who were working their way up the valley. “They’re bad,” he said gravely. “They took over the Phillotts’ place, ransacked it, and then burned it to the ground.”

  After that they kept guards posted day and night. And that same week Avery announced that there was war in the Middle East. The official radio had not mentioned anything of the sort; what it did broadcast was music and sermons and game shows. Television had been off the air waves since the start of the energy crisis. “They’re using the bomb,” Avery said. “Don’t know who, but someone is. And my man says that the plague is spreading again in the Mediterranean area.”

  In September they fought off the first attack. In October they learned the band was grouping for a second attack, this time with thirty to forty men. “We can’t keep fighting them off,” Walt said. “They must know we have food here. They’ll come from all directions this time. They know we’re watching for them.”

  “We should blow up the dam,” Clarence said. “Wait until they’re in the upper valley and flood them out.”

  The meeting was being held in the cafeteria, with everyone present. Celia’s hand tightened in David’s, but she didn’t protest. No one protested.

  “They’ll try to take the mill,” Clarence went on. “They probably think there’s wheat there, or something.” A dozen men volunteered to stand guard at the mill. Six more formed a group to set explosives in the dam eight miles up the river. Others formed a scouting party.

  David and Celia left the meeting early. He had volunteered for everything, and each time had been turned down. He was not one of the expendable ones. The rains had become “hot” again, and the people were all sleeping in the cave. David and Celia, Walt, Vlasic, the others who worked in the various labs, all slept there on cots. In one of the small offices David held Celia’s hand and they whispered before they fell asleep. Their talk was of their childhood.

  Long after Celia fell asleep he stared into the blackness, still holding her hand. She had grown even thinner, and earlier that week when he had tried to get her to leave the lab to rest, Walt had said, “Leave her be.” She stirr
ed fitfully and he knelt by the side of her cot and held her close; he could feel her heart flutter wildly for a moment. Then she was still again, and slowly he released her and sat on the stone floor with his eyes closed. Later he heard Walt moving about, and the creaking of his cot in the next office. David was getting stiff, and finally he returned to his own bed and fell asleep.

  The next day the people worked to get everything up to high ground. They would lose three houses when the dam was blown up, the barn near the road, and the road itself. Nothing could be spared, and board by board they carried a barn up the hillside and stacked the pieces. Two days later the signal was given and the dam was destroyed.

  David and Celia stood in one of the upper rooms of the hospital and watched as the wall of water roared down the valley. It was like a jet takeoff; a crowd furious with an umpire’s decision; an express train out of control; a roar like nothing he had ever heard, or like everything he had ever heard, recombined to make this noise that shook the building, that vibrated in his bones. A wall of water, fifteen feet high, twenty feet high, raced down the valley, accelerating as it came, smashing, destroying everything in its path.

  When the roar was gone and the water stood high on the land, swirling, thick with debris, Celia said in a faint voice, “Is it worth this, David?”

  He tightened his arm about her shoulders. “We had to do it,” he said.

  “I know. But it seems so futile sometimes. We’re all dead, fighting right down the line, but dead. As dead as those men must be by now.”

  “We’re making it work, honey. You know that. You’ve been working right there. Thirty new lives!”

  She shook her head. “Thirty more dead people. Do you remember Sunday school, David? They took me every week. Did you go?”

  He nodded.

  “And Wednesday-night Bible school? I keep thinking of it now. And I wonder if this isn’t God’s doing after all. I can’t help it. I keep wondering. And I had become an atheist.” She laughed and suddenly spun around. “Let’s go to bed, now. Here in the hospital. Let’s pick a fancy room, a suite. . . .”

  He reached for her, but suddenly a violent gust of wind drove a hard blast of rain against the window. It came like that, without preliminary, just a sudden deluge. Celia shuddered. “God’s will,” she said dully. “We have to get back to the cave, don’t we?”

  They walked through the empty hospital, through the long, dimly lighted passage, through the large chamber where the people were trying to find comfortable positions on the cots and benches, through the smaller passages and finally into the lab office.

  “How many people did we kill?” Celia asked, stepping out of her jeans. She turned her back to put her clothes on the foot of her cot. Her buttocks were nearly as flat as an adolescent boy’s. When she faced him again, her ribs seemed to be straining against her skin. She looked at him for a moment, and then came to him and held his head tight against her chest as he sat on his cot and she stood naked before him. He could feel her tears as they fell onto his cheek.

  There was a hard freeze in November, and with the valley flooded and the road and bridges gone, they knew they were safe from attack, at least until spring. The people had moved out of the cave again, and work in the lab went on at the same numbing pace. The fetuses were developing, growing, moving now with sudden motions of feet and elbows. David was working on substitutes for the chemicals that already were substituting for amniotic fluids. He worked each day until his vision blurred, or his hands refused to obey his directions, or Walt ordered him out of the lab. Celia was working longer hours now, still resting in the middle of the day for several hours, but she returned after that and stayed almost as late as David did.

  He passed her chair and kissed the top of her head. She looked up at him and smiled, then returned to her figures. Peter started a centrifuge. Vlasic made a last adjustment on the end tank of nutrients that were to be diluted and fed to the embryos, then called out, “Celia, you ready to count chicks?”

  “One second,” she said. She made a notation, put her pencil in the open book, and stood up.

  David was aware of her, as he always was, even when totally preoccupied with his own work. He was aware that she stood up, that she didn’t move for a moment, and when she said, in a tremulous voice that betrayed disbelief, “David . . . David . . .“ he was already starting to his feet. He caught her as she crumpled.

  Her eyes were open, her look almost quizzical, asking what he could not answer, expecting no answer. A tremor passed through her and she closed her eyes, and although her lids fluttered, she did not open them again.

  Chapter 6

  Walt looked David over and shrugged. “You look like hell,” he said.

  David made no response. He knew he looked like hell. He felt like hell. He watched Walt as if from a great distance.

  “David, are you going to pull yourself together? You just giving up?” He didn’t wait for a reply. He sat down on the only chair in the tiny room and leaned forward, cupping his chin in his hands, staring at the floor. “We’ve got to tell them. Sarah thinks there’ll be trouble. So do I.”

  David stood at the window, looking at the bleak landscape, done in grays and blacks and mud colors. It was raining, but the rain had become clean. The river was a gray swirling monster that he could glimpse from up here, a dull reflection of the dull sky.

  “They might try to storm the lab,” Walt went on. “God knows what they might decide to do.”

  David made no motion but continued to stare at the sullen sky.

  “God damn it! You turn around here and listen to me, you asshole! You think I’m going to let all this work, all this planning, go up in one irrational act! You think I won’t kill anyone who tries to stop it now!” Walt had jumped up with his outburst, and he swung David around and yelled into his face. “You think I’m going to let you sit up here and die? Not today, David. Not yet. What you decide to do next week, I don’t give a damn, but today I need you, and you, by God, are going to be there!”

  “I don’t care,” David said quietly.

  “You’re going to care! Because those babies are going to come busting out of those sacs, and those babies are the only hope we have, and you know it. Our genes, yours, mine, Celia’s, those genes are the only thing that stand between us and oblivion. And I won’t allow it, David! I refuse it!”

  David felt only a great weariness. “We’re all dead. Today or tomorrow. Why prolong it? The price is too high for adding a year or two.”

  “No price is too high!”

  Slowly Walt’s face seemed to come into focus. He was white, his lips were pale, his eyes sunken. There was a tic in his cheek that David never had seen before. “Why now?” he asked. “Why change the plan and tell them now, so far ahead of time?”

  “Because it isn’t that far ahead of time.” Walt rubbed his eyes hard. “Something’s going wrong, David. I don’t know what it is. Something’s not working. I think we’re going to have our hands full with prematures.”

  In spite of himself David made rapid calculations. “It’s twenty-six weeks,” he said. “We can’t handle that many premature babies.”

  “I know that.” Walt sat down once more, and this time put his head back and closed his eyes. “We don’t have much choice,” he said. “We lost one yesterday. Three today. We have to bring them out and treat them like preemies.”

  Slowly David nodded. “Which ones?” he asked, but he knew. Walt told him the names, and again he nodded. He had known that they were not his, not Walt’s, not Celia’s. “What are you planning?” he asked then, and sat down on the side of his bed.

  “I have to sleep,” Walt said. “Then a meeting, posted for seven. After that we prepare the nursery for a hell of a lot of preemies. As soon as we’re ready we begin getting them out. That’ll be morning. We need nurses, half a dozen, more if we can get them. Sarah says Margaret would be good. I don’t know.”

  David didn’t know either. Margaret’s four-year-old son had been
one of the first to die of the plague, and she had lost a baby in stillbirth. He trusted Sarah’s judgment, however. “Think between them they can get enough others, tell them what to do, see that they do it properly?”

  Walt mumbled something, and one of his hands fell off the chair arm. He jerked upright.

  “Okay, Walt, you get in my bed,” David said, almost resentfully. “I’ll go down to the lab, get things rolling there. I’ll come up for you at six thirty.” Walt didn’t protest, but fell onto the bed without bothering to take off his shoes. David pulled them off. Walt’s socks were more holes than not, but probably they kept his ankles warm. David left them on, pulled the blanket over him, and went to the lab.

  At seven the hospital cafeteria was crowded when Walt stood up to make his announcement. First he had Avery Handley run down his log of diminishing shortwave contacts, with the accompanying grim stories of plague, famine, disease, spontaneous abortions, stillbirths, and sterility. It was the same story worldwide. They listened apathetically; they could not care any longer what was happening to any part of the world that was not their small part. Avery finished and sat down once more.

  Walt looked small, David thought in surprise. He had always thought of him as a fairly large man, but he wasn’t. He was only five feet nine, and now he was very thin and hard-looking, like a gamecock, trimmed of all excess with only the essentials needed to carry on the fight remaining. Walt studied the assembled people and deliberately said, “There’s not a person in this room hungry tonight. We don’t have any more plague here. The rain is washing away the radioactivity, and we have food stores that will carry us for years even if we can’t plant crops in the spring. We have men capable of doing just about anything we might ever want done.” He paused and looked at them again, from left to right, back again, taking his time. He had their absolute attention. “What we don’t have,” he said, his voice hard and flat now, “is a woman who can conceive a child, or a man who could impregnate her if she was able to bear.”