He walked a long time in the frosty afternoon, seeing very little, and shaking himself from time to time when he realized that the cold was entering his shoes or making his ears numb. He should turn back, he thought often, but he walked on. And he found that he was climbing the slope to the antique forest that his grandfather had taken him to once, a long time ago. He climbed and became warmer, and at dusk he was under the branches of the tiers of trees that had been there since the beginning of time. They or others that were identical to them. Waiting. Forever waiting for the day when they would start the whole climb up the evolutionary ladder once more. Here were the relicts his grandfather had brought him to see. Here was a silverbell, grown to the stature of a large tree, where down the slopes, in the lower reaches, it remained always a shrub. Here the white basswood grew alongside the hemlock and the bitternut hickory, and the beeches and sweet buckeyes locked arms.
"David." He stopped and listened, certain he had imagined it, but the call came again. "David, are you up here?"
He turned then and saw Celia among the massive tree trunks. Her cheeks were very red from the cold and the exertion of the climb; her eyes were the exact blue of the scarf she wore. She stopped six feet from him and opened her mouth to speak again, but didn't. Instead she drew off a glove and touched the smooth trunk of a beech tree. "Grandfather Wiston brought me up here, too, when I was twelve. It was very important to him that we understand this place."
David nodded.
She looked at him then. "Why did you leave like that? They all think we're going to fight again."
"We might," he said.
She smiled. "I don't think so. Never again."
"We should start down. It'll be dark in a few minutes." But he didn't move.
"David, try to make Mother see, will you? You understand that I have to go, that I have to do something, don't you? She thinks you're so clever. She'd listen to you."
He laughed. "They think I'm clever like a puppy dog."
Celia shook her head. "You're the one they'd listen to. They treat me like a child and always will."
David shook his head, smiling, but he sobered again very quickly and said, "Why are you going, Celia? What are you trying to prove?"
"Damn it, David. If you don't understand, who will?" She took a deep breath and said, "Look, you do read the newspapers, don't you? People are starving in South America. Most of South America will be in a state of famine before the end of this decade if they aren't helped almost immediately. And no one has done any real research in tropical farming methods. Practically no one. That's all lateritic soil and no one down there understands it. They go in and burn off the trees and underbrush, and in two or three years they have a sunbaked plain as hard as iron. Okay, they send some of their bright young students here to learn about modern farming, but they go to Iowa, or Kansas, or Minnesota, or some other dumb place like that, and they learn farming methods suited to temperate climates, not tropical. Well, we trained in tropical farming and we're going to start classes down there, in the field. It's what I trained for. This project will get me a doctorate."
The Wistons were farmers, had always been farmers. "Custodians of the soil," Grandfather Wiston had said once, "not its owners, just custodians."
Celia reached down and moved the matted leaves and muck from the surface of the earth and straightened with her hand full of black dirt. "The famines are spreading. They need so much. And I have so much to give! Can't you understand that?" she cried. She closed her hand hard, compacting the soil into a ball that crumbled again when she opened her fist and touched the lump with her forefinger. She let the soil fall from her hand and carefully pushed the protective covering of leaves back over the bared spot.
"You followed me to tell me good-bye, didn't you?" David said suddenly, and his voice was harsh. "It's really good-bye this time, isn't it?" He watched her and slowly she nodded. "There's someone in your group?"
"I'm not sure, David. Maybe." She bowed her head and started to pull her glove on again. "I thought I was sure. But when I saw you in the hall, saw the look on your face when I came in . . . I realized that I just don't know."
"Celia, you listen to me! There aren't any hereditary defects that would surface! Damn it, you know that! If there were, we simply wouldn't have children, but there's no reason. You know that, don't you?"
She nodded. "I know."
"For God's sake! Come with me, Celia. We don't have to get married right away, let them get used to the idea first. They will. They always do. We have a resilient family, you and me. Celia, I love you."
She turned her head, and he saw that she was weeping. She wiped her cheeks with her glove, then with her bare hand, leaving dirt streaks. David pulled her to him, held her and kissed her tears, her cheeks, her lips. And he kept saying, "I love you, Celia."
She finally drew away and started back down the slope, with David following. "I can't decide anything right now. It isn't fair. I should have stayed at the house. I shouldn't have followed you up here. David, I'm committed to going in two days. I can't just say I've changed my mind. It's important to me. To the people down there. I can't just decide not to go. You went to Oxford for a year. I have to do something too."
He caught her arm and held her, kept her from moving ahead again. "Just tell me you love me. Say it, just once, say it."
"I love you," she said very slowly.
"How long will you be gone?"
"Three years. I signed a contract."
He stared at her in disbelief. "Change it! Make it one year. I'll be out of grad school then. You can teach here. Let their bright young students come to you."
"We have to get back, or they'll send a search party for us," she said. "I'll try to change it," she whispered then. "If I can."
Two days later she left.
David spent New Year's Eve at the Sumner farm with his parents and a horde of aunts and uncles and cousins. On New Year's Day, Grandfather Sumner made an announcement. "We're building a hospital up at Bear Creek, this side of the mill."
David blinked. That was a mile from the farm, miles from anything else at all. "A hospital?" He looked at his uncle Walt, who nodded.
Clarence was studying his eggnog with a sour expression, and David's father, the third brother, was watching the smoke curl from his pipe. They all knew, David realized. "Why up here?" he asked finally.
"It's going to be a research hospital," Walt said. "Genetic diseases, hereditary defects, that sort of thing. Two hundred beds."
David shook his head in disbelief. "You have any idea how much something like that would cost? Who's financing it?"
His grandfather laughed nastily. "Senator Burke has graciously arranged to get federal funds," he said. His voice became more caustic. "And I cajoled a few members of the family to put a little in the kitty." David glanced at Clarence, who looked pained. "I'm giving the land," Grandfather Sumner went on. "So here and there we got support."
"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.