THE SMART ONES

The first inkling came in a news bulletin that interrupted all regularly scheduled programming on the networks. Russia had uttered a flat or-else at the UN assembly, and the U.S. had countered with a steely just-try-it. That was all. It might be bad, it might not be so bad. Par-for-the-course or This-is-it. The bulletin lasted forty seconds, then regular programming was resumed. No warnings, no repeats of the Conelrad band-numbers, no stay-tuned urgings. Just the bulletin, then resumption of routine telecasts.

Pete Crolin turned to his wife, Beth. "What do you think?" he said, not having to specify his meaning further. A faint frown deepened the soft lines of her forehead.

"I don't know," she said, thoughtfully. "I think I'll call Lucille, see what she and Corey think."

Her husband nodded, then lifted his beer and sipped it slowly, savoring the taste as though he might not have the chance again, his eyes returning to—but no longer witnessing—the western which the bulletin had interrupted. Beth rose from her chair, smoothed her dress, then made her way to the phone. Lucille's was a number Beth called at least once every day, but she had to look it up after dialling two wrong numbers.

"Corey thinks so, too," her friend said, when Beth had told the reason for her call. "He's out checking the shelter. We've got plenty of water and food, but he thinks we need more books, just in case."

"I wonder why we think this is it," Beth mused. "We both felt it, and I guess you and Corey did, too. It's like that last straw on the camel's back. That kind of feeling."

Lucille, however, was in no mood for philosophizing. "Corey's coming in, honey. I've got to help him with the books. I'll call back later—" She gave a funny, short laugh. "If there is a later." Lucille hung up.

Pete had finished his beer, and was standing beside the silent TV, staring at the wall, when she returned. Beth took him by the arm, and he turned to face in her direction without resistance. "Pete," she said, then louder, "Pete!" Some of the far-awayness cleared from his eyes, and he saw her.

"Oh. What'd Lucille have to say?"

Beth gave a funny kind of smile and a half-shrug.

Pete nodded. "Them, too. I guess I knew they'd feel it. Everybody will. I wonder how long we've got."

His wife gripped his upper arms, hard. "Listen," she said. "It's not too late, yet. Lucille and Corey have told us a dozen times to come in with them if things started blowing up. There's room. I have plenty of food, so we won't infringe on theirs. Let's go over there, now. Just—Just in case."

Pete wrenched away from her and shook his head violently. "No! I've told you, over and over. I'm not going to prolong things. If the world blows itself up, I don't want to hang around for a few extra weeks to die in the wreckage of thirst or starvation. I'd as soon go when the world goes." Then his manner softened, and he took her gently by the shoulders. "But, honey—If you want to go with them, it's okay. I'll understand. Let me help you pack the car, and—"

Beth's hand came up in a blurred arc and cracked stingingly against the side of Pete's face. "Stop it!" she cried. "Stop talking that way! You know I won't go without you. What's left if you're gone!?" Pete had to grip her wrists to stop the frantic tiny fists that pummeled his chest in angry affection.

"Okay, okay, honey. I won't say it again. We'll stay here, together." He started to take her in his arms, then suddenly grinned and started turning her around to face the other way. "In fact, we'll have a party!" he said, shoving her kitchenward. "Open that bottle of wine we've been saving for Thanksgiving dinner. We'll have it, tonight, along with maybe some of that anchovy paste we bought and never tried, and—"

"There's some cold chicken in the refrigerator," said his wife, catching his infectious enthusiasm. "And I think some onion dip, and corn crisps—"

The peal of the front doorbell stopped them in the hall. "Lucille?" Pete asked his wife. Blankly, she shrugged, then crossed the short foyer and opened the door. A young man in uniform burst in, his cap pushed crazily back on his short-cropped hair. "Pete—Beth—Listen!" he said. "Did you hear the news bulletin?"

"Martin ..." Pete said, shaken. "Why aren't you at the base?" Martin Fenelly was a neighbor, a Space Reservist.

"Dorothea's out in the car. We're headed there now. Come with us, please!" begged the young officer.

"Something is going to happen, then!" said Beth.

"You bet your boots," said Martin. "Riots are starting all over the world. London, Chicago, Cairo.... Anyplace with public shelters. People are trampling one another to get in."

"But the newscasters didn't say—" started Pete, simultaneously with Beth's halting, "Conelrad isn't on the air...."

"Conelrad!" spat young Fenelly. "They don't dare use it. If they did, the panics would grow. Right now, there's still a chance of keeping some order. One warning to the populace, and the country becomes a mob, two hundred million strong!"

"Pete—!" Beth turned to stare up into his face. "What should we do?"

Pete licked dry lips, then looked shrewdly at Fenelly. "What's at the base? Shelters?"

"A ship," said Martin. "A spaceship. Never been tried, or fully tested, but it's about the only real chance anyone has. I'm going, so's Dorothea, and three of my crewmen. The others are swiping jets to fly to their homes. They want to be with their families when hell breaks loose."

"But where's it flying to? Where can you go?"

"Moonbase," said Martin. "There's plenty of room, all the synthetic foods a person needs, oxygen-generators, water-recapturing systems. It's the nearest safe spot, as of that blowup at the UN today."

Beth turned a hopeful gaze to Pete. "Should we, darling? It's not like a shelter, like you were worried about. We don't have to come out and look for food in the rubble. We can live indefinitely on Moonbase. Please, darling! Please?"

"I've got to think," said Pete, blinking. "It never occurred to me I'd have a third choice. I was resigned to sitting and waiting for the blast. Now—I'm all mixed up."

"It's life Martin's offering us!" pleaded Beth. "You can't turn down an offer of life, real survival!"

"But—But is it?!" asked Pete, uncertainly. "We can't leave Moonbase any more than we could leave Corey's shelter. What difference if we're buried alive to avoid radiation or freezing vacuum?"

"Pete, please!" said Beth, almost screaming.

"Damn it, Pete, make up your mind!" snapped Martin. "I can't wait another minute. My wife's out in the car; she's trusting me to take her to safety!"

"I—I won't go! Maybe I'm wrong, but I just don't want to leave. If I had time to think—"

"All right!" said Martin, starting for the door, angrily. "Try to do a favor, risk your own life, and—" Then he relented and rushed back to his neighbor. "Good luck, Pete," he said, gripping the older man's hand tightly. "Goodbye, Beth."

"No! No, wait!" said Beth Crolin, not daring to look at her husband's face as she rushed after the young man. "I'll come with you!" Pete just stood like carven stone, watching, as Beth hurried down the front path into the night toward the waiting car. Martin, sick with embarrassment, turned a wryly apologetic grin Pete's way before following after her.

When the sound of the engine faded in the distance, Pete finally managed to move, and closed the door on the cold night outside. He went to the kitchen, stared hard at the bottle of wine in its corner of the pantry shelf, then yanked it down and smashed it to glittering bits in the sink.

"Corey," complained Lucille, "you know you're not going to read Vanity Fair or Coningsby. You've started them a hundred times, and always lost interest. We could use the space for a hundred better things."

Corey shoved the books doggedly back into the slot from which his wife had taken them on the bookshelf, and set his back stubbornly against them, glaring at her. "Those are records," he said, fighting an urge to shout. "The society of Thackeray's time, the British school system of Disraeli's. Some day our children will want to know what the world was like before the disaster."

"Why?" said his wife. "What they don't know won't hurt them. They'll never wonder about it if you don't prod them to. And why should they know about Vanity Fair and Coningsby anyhow? You've survived this long without knowing!"

"All right, all right!" snarled Corey, whirling to the shelf, and pulling books out by the handful. "Fill the space with Wheaties, or movie magazines! Or home permanents and lipstick! To hell with our children's minds!"

"Corey, stop it!" hollered Lucille, trying to pick the books from the shelter floor as he hurled them there, then giving up and simply trying to pin his flailing arms. His elbow struck her in the chest, and she fell back with a startled grunt. Corey, his face white, started toward her with words of remorse on his lips, then tripped ingloriously upon the heaped volumes and sprawled on his face at her feet.

Lucille sank into a chair as he rose groggily on hands and knees, and began to laugh. Corey, after a second, began to match her laughter with his own. Then he frowned and stopped. Her laughter was all wrong. He took her by the shoulders and shook her, but she kept on laughing while the tears ran down her contorted face.

"You should have told me!" moaned Martin, on his knees beside the metal-and-nylon cot. Dorothea just groaned and tossed her head from side to side on the sweat-soaked pillow, fighting the restraining straps.

"S—Surprise," she mumbled, her features white with agony. "I w-wanted it to be a surprise."

"But—" her husband sobbed, beating his fists futilely against the steel bulkhead, "didn't you know the takeoff would be like that? Haven't I told you how many grown men had died of internal hemorrhages from the gravities they had to resist during takeoff? Didn't you suspect that you—!?"

He stopped, and sagged, his head resting against the frame of her bunk, and just sobbed softly, uselessly, while his wife murmured, over and over, like a fragment of intolerably sad music, "My baby, my little baby, my poor baby...."

Pete sat in a thick, muddling fog, his fingers fumbling with paper and glue, sniffling softly in his misery. He didn't hear the light footsteps on the porch, nor the familiar voice, until his name was called for the third time. Then he started, guiltily, and began to try and hide what he held clumsily on his lap.

Beth came into their bedroom and saw him, and what he was trying to do. The empty beer cans, the shattered glass upon the carpeted floor, and the ragged tear in the wallpaper between bureau and closet told her what he'd done. "I don't blame you," she said softly, cupping her hand gently about the back of his neck. Pete suddenly choked on his tears and flung his arms about her thighs, burying his face hard against her abdomen.

"I was so mad—so mad at you," he said between spasms of relieved weeping. "I came up here, drinking, saw the wedding picture on the wall—s-smashed the glass, and—"

Beth looked at the wedding photo where it had fallen in two curling halves upon the floor, and smiled. "But you tried to fix it again," she said softly.

"Of course I tried to fix it!" he muttered, keeping his face close against the warm softness of her belly. "I got mad, but I got over it."

"Me, too," said Beth. "A mile from the house, I screamed for Martin to let me out of the car. I had to walk back. No one's bothering to run the busses anymore, I—I saw the wine, in the sink. Is there any beer left?"

He nodded, mutely, still holding her tightly.

"Then we can still have our party," she said decisively. "Maybe not so fancy as we'd planned, but—"

Then her husband was surging to his feet and stilling her lips with the hungry pressure of his own.

Hours before the spaceship reached Moonbase, the men stationed there saw the horror begin. The orb of Earth, silver and blue against the black void of space, began to erupt with tiny bubbles of orange-and-white, faster and faster, until the shapes of the continents were limned against the steady blue glow of the oceans. Then the fringe of the oceans began to billow white rolling clouds of steam, and the planet shrouded itself in impenetrable heaving seas of angry white vapor.

Some common tacit urging made the men continue with their jobs there, go through the routine of scanning the universe, radioing reports to stations long since molten piles of slag, metering the water and precious oxygen that kept them alive. No one wanted to talk of what they'd seen; life went on for many hours as though nothing untoward had happened. Then, when the last strained thread of control was fraying madly—

The spaceship landed, with its five-person complement.

"More mouths to feed," said the Moonbase commander, looking out through the port at the spacesuited figures moving clumsily toward the airlock. "I don't know if we should let them in. Even if it's the President, I don't know."

"Sir," said an aide, "Look there, in the lead. The small one, leaning on the arm of another one. I think it's a woman."

The commander's eyes hooded for a moment, then he turned to his aide and said, "Let her in."

"Before the others, you mean, sir?" asked the man.

"Let her in. Period."

"S-sir ..." said the aide, his voice shaking. "You're not thinking of—"

"We've been here for three months without a woman, Captain," said the commander. "This may be the last one alive in the cosmos. I'm not sure the man with her would agree to sharing her."

"But the others—They can't live out there for more than a few hours in their spacesuits...."

But the commander had picked up a book of crossword puzzles, and was concentrating fiercely on a cryptogram. The other man swallowed noisily, once, then went to carry out the orders.

"It's over," said Corey to his wife. Lucille nodded dully. "Don't you understand, honey? The bombing's stopped, and we're still alive. Enough food for months. The radiation-count will be down by then, and—"

"And what?" asked Lucille, staring from her husband's face to the two children sleeping on the military cot before the crowded bookshelf. "When it's down, what happens next?"

"Why—We go out. We rebuild."

"Rebuild? Rebuild what? How?" said Lucille. "Can you build a radio? If you could, who would we talk to, listen to?"

"I mean, rebuild houses, start farming, raise animals...."

"Will the land grow food any more? Are there animals left out there, or did they forget to burrow underground when the fires began?" said Lucille.

"Be reasonable, honey!" said Corey.

"That's what I'm being, for the first time in years," she said. "I wish we'd stayed with Pete and Beth."

"They've turned to ashes by now," said Corey.

Lucille shrugged. "Maybe they're better off." The baby began to cry, and kick its round pink legs.

"I think the baby needs a change, or something," said Corey, looking down at his infant son.

"Read him Coningsby," said Lucille. Then she started laughing again, until Corey was forced to slap her face crimson to quiet her.

Just a few weeks short of two years after the holocaust, the great spaceship settled on faltering fires to the charred surface of the Earth. The Moonbase commander, gaunt from long starvation, reeled out into the glaring white sunlight, fell face downward upon the sharp black rocks, and just lay there, trying to catch his breath. Behind him, a pale shadow formed in the blackness of the open airlock, and a woman crept out, her hair tangled and white-streaked, her face raddled with disease. She shuddered, and sank to a squatting position on the ground, covering her face with her hands to block out the horrible vista that ran for mile upon scorched mile.

"It's dead, the world's dead," she mewled, quaking. "We're at a wake, a hideous, horrible wake!"

The commander groaned and lifted himself up painfully on his elbows. "There's got to be something, somewhere, or we've had it."

"It's your fault," said the woman. "What did you expect the men to do when you kept me to yourself! You shared me with them nearly two years. You shouldn't have locked the men out of your quarters."

"I was drunk!" the commander said bitterly. "I didn't think they'd go berserk—wreck the synthesizers—fight among themselves—"

"I had a husband, once," said the woman. "You let him freeze to death, suffocate, all because he would have wanted to keep me for himself. You turned around and did the same thing." Musingly, she eyed a large jagged stone, lifted it in her hand, and approached the weary, sprawling form on the ground. "If he deserved to die, why not you?"

"That was different," said the commander. "I'd have shared you when I sobered up. He'd never—" He hadn't time for even a gasp as the woman brought the stone down with both hands upon the nape of his neck, shattering the bone beneath the thin flesh there. He fell forward, drooling blood on the sun-baked black rock.

"No," said the woman, brushing her hands firmly against her thighs to cleanse them of the feel of the rock. "Martin would never. That's why I loved him."

Tiredly, she began to walk, away from the ship and the memories of degradation it held for her, out across the hot, blazing plains of arid rock, humming a lilting waltz that had been played at her highschool prom.

When she could walk no further, she lay down on the rock, rolled onto her back, and smiled emptily at the stark blue skies overhead until unconsciousness stole over her.

A hundred miles away, a naked boy knelt before a cairn of rock, frowning in concentration, his tongue tucked against the corner of his mouth as he carefully arranged smooth red pebbles before the cairn until their design pleased him. Under the cairn lay a steel-and-concrete door, and within the chamber beyond it lay the mummified bodies of his parents and siblings, as he'd found them when he was old enough to crawl. He was walking now, pretty well for his fifteen months of life. He could only judge his progress by the progress of others like him, children conceived amid the radiation and gene-mutating chaos of those first months in the shelters.

He'd determined to be a leader. He didn't know the word "leader", of course, but he would soon coin a sound that conveyed that meaning to himself and the others. He didn't know why his parents were dead, or the parents of the others like himself. Perhaps one always died when one reached a certain age. Still, why had his brother and sister died, then, since they had so much growing to do before they matched that of his parents?

He shrugged away the problem, finished his arrangement of colored stones, and stood up to consider them. They would do nicely, he decided. They would prettify the spot where his ancestry lay buried, here amid the rocky splendors of such a lovely, incredibly beautiful planet.

He scowled, suddenly, deciding that the pattern of stones held one red rock too many. Carefully, he removed it.

He sent a short series of affectionate thoughts toward the departed souls of his family, then turned away from the cairn and began to toddle across the burning black rock toward the area housing the shelters of the other children. He was tired of mourning for the day. Besides, the other kids were considering building a structure to keep off the infrequent hot rains, and he thought he knew a way to support the roof which no one else had yet considered.

Thinking hard as he moved toward the community area, he tossed the colored pebble up and down absently in one hand, then popped it into his mouth and chewed it up with relish. It was only an appetizer. For dinner, at sunset, he had his eye on a rainbow outcropping of quartz. It should be delicious.

THE END