The Last Supper: And Other Stories Page 4

  “The devil with Connecticut. What would it do here in Ohio?”

  “Well, Mr. Baxter, that depends. Suppose a little cobalt was added to one of them and it was dropped here in the lakeside vicinity. If there were prevailing north winds, it would have just about the same effect.”

  “You mean one bomb would kill everyone in Ohio?”

  “Yes, sir, and the cows and the ducks and the pigs, too. And the wheat and the corn,” Mr. Somerville added, unable to contain his bent for precision.

  “I’ll be damned.”

  “It’s a remarkable weapon,” Mr. Somerville said with a note of enthusiasm.

  “I’ll be damned. Do they know all this in Washington?”

  “Oh, yes, Mr. Baxter. They’ve published some very fine material on the subject—scholarly material.”

  “Well, why in hell’s name don’t they do something about it?”

  Mr. Somerville reflected that perhaps there was nothing they could do about it, but he did not voice that opinion, knowing full well that as a scientist it was not his place to meddle in politics.

  “Of course, we could do the same to Moscow,” Mr. Baxter added as an afterthought.

  “Yes, sir—indeed we could.”

  Mr. Baxter knitted his brows and stared at Mr. Somerville. For almost a minute, he sat like that, staring silently at the scientist. Then he burst out, “Damn it all, you’d think those fools in Washington would drop everything else and set about building shelters. What about that, Somerville?”

  “It’s not quite as easy as it sounds, Mr. Baxter. An ordinary air raid shelter, such as they used in the last war, would be worthless. Even deep subways are quite useless.”

  “I don’t mean a direct hit, Somerville.”

  “We can no longer even think in such terms as a direct hit,” Somerville said, inspired as he always was when it came to expounding a scientific point to Mr. Baxter, and even more delighted that Mr. Baxter was willing to listen. Usually, Mr. Baxter’s reaction would be not to bother him with the damn details, but to go ahead and get the thing into production. But this time, it seemed, Mr. Baxter wanted details. “You see, a hit is direct enough within a ten mile radius, and atmospheric poisoning may extend to a hundred or two hundred mile radius, depending upon the constituent factors of the bomb. Theoretically, it is possible for a single cobalt bomb, with proper wind currents, to destroy every human being within the continental United States—theoretically, of course, but not very likely. Still in all, we can’t think in terms of direct hits and avoiding them. That’s probably what has Washington so baffled.”

  “And how long does this atmospheric poisoning last?”

  “We really don’t know, never having faced such a situation before, but guesses vary anywhere from a few days to a few centuries.”

  “A few centuries?” Mr. Baxter gasped.

  “Oh, yes, sir—yes, indeed. Of course, surface life of any kind might not survive, but life would go on in the depths of the sea, and eventually the normal course of evolution would resume, and it’s even conceivable that one day, billions of years from now, man would appear again.”

  “That’s damn comforting,” said Mr. Baxter.

  “Of course,” Somerville added thoughtfully, “a self-contained shelter could be built. It would have to be quite deep, sealed off from the surface, and prepared to supply its occupants for at least five years. That presents a number of problems, but I suppose they could be tackled and licked. Yes, it’s an interesting problem.”

  “And what do you suppose such an outfit would cost, Somerville?” Mr. Baxter asked greedily.

  Mr. Somerville would have preferred a month to work it out, with estimates from various builders and exact costs on every item, but he knew that Mr. Baxter wanted his questions answered immediately, even if not too accurately. So Mr. Somerville leaned back, closed his eyes, and figured at top speed, while Mr. Baxter preserved an unusual and interested silence. Finally, Mr. Somerville said, “I think it could be done for three million—that’s not an accurate figure, of course, but it shouldn’t cost a great deal more.”

  Mr. Baxter’s lunch in Cleveland that day was with Harvey Ramson, who was sixty-eight, who had made a cool fifty million out of an aircraft industry he had developed since the war on government orders, who knew everyone in Washington, and who had just returned from a special job in Washington. He called the president and every member of the president’s cabinet by their first names, and they called him Harvey. Mr. Baxter stood in a certain awe of Harvey Ramson and his opinions, and therefor managed in the course of the luncheon to ask him whether he thought there would be war with Russia.

  “Got to be, sooner or later,” Mr. Ramson said. “Got to be a showdown. The whole free world and the American way of life’s at stake.”

  But didn’t the H bomb make a difference, Mr. Baxter wanted to know?

  “Don’t believe they got it, and if they got it, don’t believe they know how to get it off the ground. No technology in Russia, no know-how. A land of peasants.”

  But if they did have it, Mr. Baxter insisted?

  “Got to wallop them before they get it off the ground. Massive retaliation—that’s the word for it.”

  But somehow, “massive retaliation” was less than satisfying to Mr. Baxter, and once again, he slept poorly. This time, however, instead of nightmares, he had a dream which he afterward thought of as something of a vision. Not that he ever mentioned this thought to any of his friends, but there it was. He dreamed that he stood on a high peak, with his wife beside him, his two sons and their wives and children, his daughter; and the world lay dead and silent beneath him. Then a voice said, “Go and make it fruitful.” A fine voice, and it was a lovely dream. Henry J. Baxter woke up feeling refreshed and at peace for the first time since he had heard about the cursed bomb.

  “Clarise,” he told his wife at breakfast, “I’m going to build an air-raid shelter, self-contained,”

  “I think that’s very thoughtful of you, Henry,” his wife nodded. She had no idea that the shelter would, according to Mr. Somerville, cost about three million dollars.

  For the next twenty weeks, Mr. Baxter was absorbed in the building of the shelter. He built it on the grounds of his lake-front estate, which covered three hundred acres, and gave him all the privacy he required. Mr. Somerville, himself designed it, and they employed the three brightest young engineers in the plant to expedite its construction.

  But about the bright young engineers, Mr. Baxter often felt as he did about the various managers of his plant. They were all right, but it wasn’t their plant; and while these bright young engineers were all right, it wasn’t their shelter they were building. Mr. Baxter stopped going to the country club and spent long hours compiling lists of things a large family would need for several years in a shelter. He was amazed at the endless number of things required to continue the Baxter family in the style to which it was accustomed—and he was also amazed at his wife’s attitude.

  “If you think I’m going to spend five years down in that hole and do my own housework, Henry,” she said firmly, “you’ve got another thought coming.”

  “It’s not a hole,” Mr. Baxter said coldly. “It’s every bit as good as the one Ike has under the White House, but you can’t go adding rooms to it.”

  “Yes I can,” countered Mrs. Baxter. “Either you install servants’ quarters, or leave me out.”

  “For a quarter of a million dollars?”

  “What?” Mrs. Baxter looked at her husband as if she were seeing him for the first time. “Henry, just what is this shelter costing us?”

  “About three million dollars without the servants’ quarters.”

  “I think you’ve gone out of your mind,” she whispered—which came as a surprise, for it was the first time he had ever known Clarise to be concerned about money.

  “You won’t think so when those H bombs begin to drop.”

  But what Mrs. Baxter thought when her husband cancelled their Europ
ean trip and even intimated that until the bombs began to fall, there would be no more trips for them, does not bear printing. For two weeks, she did not speak to him, but it is questionable whether he realized that, so deeply was he involved with the shelter. He sat up a whole night with the grocery list. He read five brochures on vitamin pills before he ordered the twenty thousand that he felt would be necessary, and he regretted a hundred times that he had not trained one of his sons to be a physician. He pored over seed catalogues in order to select the germs that would once again make the earth fruitful. He called in experts on livestock and experts on horticulture, and he read the pages of his favorite magazine, U. S. News and World Report, more carefully than ever before seeking for inside information as to the imminence of war; for now, as the shelter neared completion, he felt that he was involved in a desperate race with time, and it made him sick at heart to think that they might start throwing the H bombs before he was ready.

  Strangely enough, his hatred of communism, which had at one time been outstanding, even for an Ohio millionaire, began to cool. The Russians had provided what was now the prime motive in his life, and at times he felt rather warmly toward them. He was becoming more and more religious, and he began to believe that in his dream, he had met God face to face. Even that long sought after dinner at the White House, which Harvey Ramson had promised to arrange, paled into insignificance against this.

  Meanwhile, his beautiful meadows on the bluff overlooking the lake had been turned into a construction site. Great steam shovels bit deeper and deeper into the ground. Wooden forms rose in the gaping hole, and an endless stream of concrete poured down to provide security for the, Baxter family. Tractors lumbered back and forth and steel girders swung on booms. The temporary slack in construction in Northern Ohio was taken up with Mr. Baxter’s vision, and hundreds of men brought paychecks home each week and turned them into food for their children and clothes and rent; but of all this Mr. Baxter was superbly unaware. And when finally the form of the massive underground house which could survive even a direct hit of a hydrogen bomb took shape, Mr. Baxter’s mood could be compared to one of actual ecstasy. Everyone at the plant, his friends, his associates, his wife—everyone noticed the change in him, the manner in which he held his head, so straight and confident, the way his eyes shone, the way his voice had become, so soft, so knowing.

  One September evening, when the shelter was almost complete, as Mr. Baxter stood near the elevator that led down to it, admiring the concrete result of his vision, a quick autumn thunderstorm blew out of the lake. Mr. Baxter ran for shelter, but the rain overtook him before he reached his house. On the garden path to his den, deluged by sheets of water, his foot slipped, and he fell and struck his head a resounding whack on the flagstones. He lay there in the rain for more than an hour, and it was only when he failed to appear for dinner that his wife sent the servants out to look for him. When they found Mr. Baxter, he was quite dead and already cold.

  All of his children and grandchildren came in for the funeral, and for the reading of the will. He had told them nothing about the shelter, for he had intended to inform them only after it was complete, and now Clarise thought it better not to mention it at all. She looked very youthful and beautiful in black, and while she bowed to all the conventions of sorrow, everyone remarked on how well she looked. The will allocated the lake, place and some five million dollars in securities to Mrs. Baxter, the other interests being divided among the sons and the daughter, and Clarise, who had never been a greedy woman, was quite content with her share.

  Clarise waited three months before she left for Europe, and in that time, she did her best to sell the lakeside place; but the air was full of talk about negotiations and banning the H bomb and no one wanted to invest three million dollars in a self-contained shelter. In the south of France, Mrs. Baxter met an Austrian count, whom she married in what her children thought was an indecently short time—and it was remarkable how much attention the count, who had never been a business man, gave to her securities. When he discovered that her lakeside property had been reassessed to a value of four million dollars, he persuaded her to let it go in default for the taxes—and the county simply boarded it up and let the acres of lawn go to weed. The hermatically sealed elevator began to rust, and the twenty thousand vitamin pills lay silently, waiting vainly for someone to gobble them.

  Sometimes, Mrs. Baxter had wistful thoughts of her first husband, Henry; but whenever she found herself giving way to feelings of guilt, she imagined five years in the self-contained shelter, and that stiffened her spine. As for her second husband, the, Austrian count, with five million dollars to spend, he never gave a second thought to the H bomb.

  Only Mr. Somerville was really regretful. He had been sure that science combined with American know-how could lick a direct hit by an H bomb, and sometimes he felt very sad because Henry J. Baxter never really had a chance to test his theories.

  A Walk Home

  MARTIN ANDERSON LIVED EIGHT BLOCKS FROM THE plant, and almost every evening, he walked home. If the weather was very bad, hard rain or snow or sleet, he would sometimes take a lift from some of the boys who shared a car-pool, for he was well liked, and they were always ready to squeeze a little tighter or even carry him on someone’s lap for the few blocks; but by and large, he enjoyed the walk, even in the rain, and living so close to the plant made it possible for him and Alice and the two kids to have a few things that those who owned cars couldn’t afford.

  It also did him good to stretch his legs and breathe deeply of fresh, clean air after spending a whole day at a lathe, where the air stank of the smell of oil and hot metal and men’s sweat, and where his leg muscles cramped up and got tighter and tighter as the day went on. Eight blocks were just right, not too long a distance, not too short a distance; it gave him time with his own thoughts, a chance to think through matters that could never be to reflect, to see himself and examine himself, an opunraveled in the clank and turmoil of the plant, a chance portunity to arrange the incidents of the day, so that those incidents would be amusing to Alice and the kids.

  By and large, when he was home, he stayed home. He had given up drinking two years ago, and the high cost of baby sitters confined evenings out to one or at the most two nights on the weekend, and more important, he liked his family. He looked forward all day to the few hours before the kids’ bedtime, and at least three nights a week, there were television programs he really enjoyed. He had just passed his thirty-sixth year, and sometimes he felt that he was becoming stodgy and sedentary as he moved into middle-age; but this feeling was not accompanied by any resentment.

  He had other resentments, but not on the score of his wife and kids, and each evening as he left the plant, he felt a specific sense of pleasure at the fact that he would soon be with them, and that the simple, daily incidents of the evening would then unfold, playing with the kids, eating dinner, helping Alice with the dishes, being called in on this or that problem of the day, and so forth and so on, and he was thinking of this and nothing more tonight, as he left the plant and noticed, in the cold, gathering twilight, the pink-orange band of the setting sun across the housetops, its clean, cold beauty. It mixed in his thoughts, cleansed them with cold color as he passed through the gates and waved goodnight to some of his friends. He almost did not notice as the two men fell in step with him, one on either side of him.

  And then he did notice and was a little afraid, because they walked regularly and purposefully on either side of him, but not for any other reason. Anderson had few physical fears; he was a large man with broad, sloping shoulders, and his appearance commanded respect. The two men who had fallen in step with him were both smaller than he was; they were just youngsters; they were no more than twenty-six or twenty-seven years old. They were well dressed in neat gray worsted topcoats, gray sharkskin suits and black shoes. They had round, slightly-overfed faces, snub noses and blue eyes. They looked like they might be brothers. They looked sure of themselves, but not to
o sure of themselves.

  Anderson continued to walk. The only thought in his mind at that moment was that he had eight blocks to walk home. One of the two men said,

  “Hello, Marty.”

  “Nice evening, isn’t it, Marty?” the other said.

  “What do you want?” Anderson demanded.

  “You’re Martin Anderson, aren’t you?”

  “Suppose I am?”

  “Why don’t you take it easy, Marty? This is just a routine thing. We’re from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Here are our credentials, all straight and above board.”

  Each in turn took out his wallet and showed Anderson his credentials. Anderson barely looked at the badges and papers; the truth of the matter was that he had known when they fell in step with him; he didn’t have to look. In the whole world, no one falls in step with you like that but a couple of cops. You don’t have to look. He stepped down into the gutter, and thought fleetingly that there were seven more blocks home, seven blocks that he knew like the, back of his hand, past the auto graveyard, past the block of taxpayers, past the muddy field where there were always some kids playing association football, past the Staysweet doll factory, past three blocks of rickety wooden tenements—and then he would see Alice and in the moment alone with her as he kissed her, before the kids were on top of him, say, “What do you know, a couple of F.B.I. guys took a walk with me,” and then, if she became disturbed, he would say, “The hell with them—the hell with the bastards!” just like that, as he was saying it now to himself, “The hell with them—”

  One said, “This is just a little, talk. We know you like to walk home, Marty. We thought we’d walk home with you.”

  The other said, “No more than that, Marty. We just thought we’d like to walk home with you and talk to you a little.”

  One said, “Because, when you come down to it, we felt you’re a good American, Marty. A damn good patriotic American. As a matter of fact, we know all about you. We know about your war record. We know about the Silver Star and all about that incident at Anzio. You’d be surprised how much we know, because it’s our business to know things, Marty. That’s how we know you’re a good American, with a fine wife and two clean-cut kids.”