Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank
Randy worried about this until Dan explained.
“I’ve been training the children to be quick subjects, because in an emergency, they have their own built-in supply of ether.”
“And if you’re not around?”
“Helen is studying hypnotism too.” He was thoughtful. “She’s becoming quite expert. You know, Helen could have been a doctor. Helen isn’t happy unless she’s caring for someone. She takes care of me.”
A week later Ben Franklin developed a stomachache which forced him to draw up his right knee when he tried to lie down. The ache was always there and at intervals it became sharp pain enveloping him in waves. Dan decided Ben’s pain was not from eating too many bananas. It was impossible to take a blood count but the boy had a slight fever and Dan knew he had to go into him.
Dan operated on the billiard table in the gameroom, after putting Ben into deep trance. Dan used the steak knives, darning needles, hair curlers, and nylon line, all properly sterilized, and removed an appendix distended and near to bursting.
In five days Ben was up and active. After that Randy, somewhat in awe, referred to Dan as “our witch doctor.”
In August they used the last of the corn, squeezed the last of the late oranges, the Valencias, and plucked the last overripe but deliciously sweet grapefruit from the trees. In August they ran out of salt, armadillos destroyed the yam crop, and the fish stopped biting. That terribly hot August was the month of disaster.
The end of the corn and exhaustion of the citrus crop had been inevitable. Armadillos in the yams was bad luck, but bearable. But without fish and salt their survival was in doubt.
Randy had carefully rationed salt since he was shocked, in July, to discover how few pounds were left.Salt was a vital commodity, not just white grains you shook on eggs. Dan used saline solutions for half dozen purposes. The children used salt to brush their teeth. Without salt, the slaughter of the Henry pigs would have been a terrible waste. They planned to tan one hide to cut badly needed moccasins, and without salt this was impossible.
As soon as they were out of salt it seemed that almost everything required salt, most of all the human body. Day after day the porch thermometer stood at ninety-five or over and every day all of them had manual labor to do, and miles to walk. They sweated rivers. They sweated their salt away, and they grew weak, and they grew ill. And all of Fort Repose grew weak and ill for there was no salt anywhere.
In July Randy had gone to Rita Hernandez and she had traded five pounds of salt to him for three large bass, a bushel of Valencias, and four buckshot shells. She had traded not so much for these things, Randy believed, but because he had helped her arrange decent burial, for Pete, and provided the pallbearers to carry him to Repose-in-Peace Park. Since July, he had been unable to trade for salt anywhere. In Marines Park a pound of salt would be worth five pounds of coffee, if anyone had coffee.
You could not even buy salt with corn liquor, potent if only slightly aged.
In August the traders in Marines Park dragged themselves about like zombies, for want of salt. And for the first time in his life Randy felt a weird uneasiness and craving that became almost madness when he rubbed the perspiration from his face and then tasted salt on his fingers. Now he understood the craving of animals for salt, understood why a cougar and a deer would share the same salt lick in the enforced truce of salt starvation.
But even more important than salt was fish, for the fish of the river was their staple, like seal to the Eskimo. It had been so simple, until August. Their bamboo set poles, butts lodged in metal or wooden holders on the ends and sides of their docks, each night usually provided enough fish for the following day. In the morning someone would stroll down to the dock and haul up whatever had hooked itself in the hours of darkness. If the night’s automatic catch was lean, or if extra fish were needed for trading, someone was granted leave from regular chores to fish in the morning, or at dusk when the feeding bass struck savagely. Their poles grew in clumps, they had line aplenty, hooks enough to last for years (fishing had been the pre-Day hobby of Bill McGovern and Sam Hazzard as well as Randy), and every kind of bait—worms, crickets, grasshoppers, tadpoles, minnows, shiners—for anyone capable of using a shovel, throw net, or simply his hands.
Randy had more than a hundred plugs and spoons and perhaps half as many flies and bass bugs. He had bought, them knowing well that most lures are designed to catch fishermen rather than fish. Still, on occasion the bass would go wild for artificials and in the spring the specks and bream would snap up small flies and tiny spoons. So fish had never been a problem, until they stopped biting.
When they stopped they stopped all at once and all together. Even with his circular shrimp net, wading—barefoot in the shallows, Lib beside him hopefully carrying a bucket, Randy could not net a shiner, bream, cat, or even mudfish. Randy considered himself a good fisherman and yet he admitted he didn’t understand why fish bit or why they didn’t. August had never been a good month for black bass, true, but this August was strange. Only during thunderstorms was there a ripple on the river. A molten sun rose, grew white hot, and sank red and molten, and the river was unearthly still and oily, agitated no more than Florence’s aquarium. Even at crack of dawn or final light, no fish jumped or swirled. It was bad. And it was eerie and frightening.
In the third week of August when they were all weak and half-sick Randy spoke his fears to Dan. It was evening. Randy and Lib had just come from the hammock. For an hour they had crouched together under a great oak waiting for the little gray squirrels to feed. They had been utterly quiet and the squirrels had been noisy and Randy had blasted two of them out of the tree with his double twenty, a shameful use of irreplaceable ammunition for very little meat. Yet two squirrels was enough to give meat flavor to a stew that night. What they would have for breakfast, if anything, nobody knew. They found Dan in Randy’s office, with Helen trimming his hair. Randy told them about the two squirrels and then he said, “Dan, I’ve been thinking about the fish. I’ve never seen fishing this bad before. Could anything big and permanent have happened? Could radiation have wiped them out, or anything?”
Dan scratched at his beard and Helen brushed his hand down and said, “Sit still.”
Dan said, “Fish. Let me think about fish. I doubt that anything happened to the fish. If the river had been poisoned by fallout right after The Day the dead fish would have come to the surface. The river would have been blanketed with fish. That didn’t happen then and it hasn’t happened since. No, I doubt that there has been a holocaust of fish.”
“It worries me,” Randy said.
“Salt worries me more. Salt doesn’t grow or breed or spawn. You either have it or you don’t.”
Helen swung the swivel chair. Dan was facing the teak chest. Suddenly he lifted himself out of the chair, flung himself on his knees, opened the chest and began to dig into it. “The diary!” he shouted.
“Where’s the diary?”
“It’s there. Why?”
“There’s salt in the diary! Remember when Helen was reading it to me after I was slugged by the highwaymen? There was something about salt in it. Remember, Helen?”
Randy had not looked into the log of Lieutenant Randolph Rowzee Peyton for years, but now it was coming back to him, and he did remember. Lieutenant Peyton’s Marines had also lacked and needed salt, and somehow obtained it. He dropped on his knees beside Dan and quickly found the log. He skimmed through the pages. Lieutenant Peyton, as he recalled it had run out of salt in the second year.
He found an entry, dated August 19, 1839:
“The supply boat from Cow’s Ford being much overdue, and my command lacking salt and suffering greatly from the heat, on 6 August I dispatched my loyal Creek guide, Billy Longnose, down the St. Johns (sometimes called River May) to discover the cause of delay. Today he returned with the information that our supply boat, beating its way upstream, had put into dock at Mandarin (a town named to honor the oriental nation from which it imported
The next entry was dated August 21. Randy read it aloud:
“Billy Longnose today brought to the Fort a Seminole, a very dirty and shifty-eyed buck calling himself Kyukan, who offered to guide me to a place where there is sufficient salt to fill this Fort ten times over. So he says. In payment he demanded one gallon of rum. While it is unlawful to sell spirits to the Seminoles, nothing is said about giving them drink. Accordingly, I offered the buck a half-gallon jug, and he agreed.”
Randy turned the page and said, “Here it is. Twenty-three April”:
“This day I returned to Fort Repose in the second boat, bringing twelve large sacks of salt. It was true. I could have filled the Fort ten times over.
“The place is near the headwaters of the Timucuan, some twenty-two nautical miles, I should judge, up that tributary. It is called by an Indian word meaning Blue Crab Pool. The pool itself is crystal clear, like the Silver Springs. I thought it surrounded by a white beach, but then discovered that what I thought sand was pure salt. It was quite unbelievable. In this pool there were blue crabs, such as are found only in the ocean, yet the pool is many miles inland, and two hundred miles from the mouth of the St. John, or May.”
Randy closed the log, grinned, and said, “I’ve heard of Blue Crab Run but I’ve never been there. My father used to go there when he was a boy, for crab feasts. He never mentioned salt. I guess salt didn’t impress my father. It was always in the kitchen. He had plenty.”
The next morning the Fort Repose fleet set sail, five boats commanded by an admiral whose last sea command had also been five ships—a super-carrier, two cruisers, and two destroyers.
By August most of the boats in Fort Repose had been fitted with sails cut from awnings, draperies, or even nylon sheets for the lighter outboards, and with keels or sideboards, and hand-carved rudders. For the expedition up the Timucuan, Sam Hazzard chose boats of exceptional capacity and stability. Randy’s light Fiberglas boat wasn’t suitable, so Randy went along as the Admiral’s crew. With the south wind blowing hot and steady, they planned to reach Blue Crab Pool before night and be back in Fort Repose by noon the next day, for their speed would double on their return voyage downstream.
Their five boats crewed thirteen men, all well armed. It would be the first night Randy had spent away from Lib since their marriage, and she seemed somewhat distressed by this. But Randy had no fear for her safety, or for the safety of Fort Repose. His company now numbered thirty men. It controlled the rivers and the roads. Knowing this, highwaymen shunned Fort Repose. The phrase “deterrent force” had been popular before The Day and effective so long as that force had been unmistakably superior. Randy’s company was certainly the most efficient force in Central Florida, and he intended to keep it so.
Sitting at the tiller, gold-encrusted cap pushed back on his head, the wind singing through the stays, the Admiral seemed to have sloughed off a decade. “You know,” he said, “when I was at the Academy they still insisted that we learn sail before steam. They used to stick us in catboats and make us whip back and forth on the Severn and learn knots and rigs and spars. I thought it was silly. I still do, but it is fun.”
They reached a curve of the river and Randy watched the captain’s walk on his roof disappear behind the cypress and palms. It was fun, he thought, and it was quiet. In a sailboat a man could think.
He thought about the fish, and what had happened to them, for his stomach was empty.
Peyton Bragg was bored, disgusted, and angry. She had helped Ben Franklin plan the hunt. She had even walked to town with Ben and helped him locate the books in the library that told about armadillos.
The armadillo, they had learned, was a nocturnal beast that curled up deep underground in daylight hours. In the night he burrowed like a mole just under the surface, locating and eating tender roots and tubers, in this case the Henrys’ yams. The exciting thing they learned was that in his native Central America the armadillo was considered a delicacy. The armadillo was food.
Then, when it came time for the hunt, Ben had refused to take her along. A girl couldn’t stay out all night in the woods, Ben said. It was too dangerous for a girl; She would have presented her case to Randy for judgment, but Randy was gone with the Admiral, and her mother agreed with Ben.
So Ben had gone off that, evening with Caleb and Graf. It was Ben’s contention that Graf was the key to armadillo hunting, and so it had proved. In Germany the dachshund was originally bred as a badger hound, which meant that he could dig like mad and would fearlessly and tenaciously pursue any animal underground.
Ben had been armed with a machete and his .22 rifle, but it was Caleb’s spear that had been the effective weapon against armadillos. They had gone to the yam patch in the moonlight. The whole patch was plowed with armadillo runs. Ben introduced Graf to an opening and Graf, sniffing and understanding at once, had wormed his way into the earth. Presently there came an awful snarling and growling from a corner of the patch. Locating the armadillo from Graf’s sounds, Caleb prodded it with his spear, and the armadillo burst out. This eruption so surprised Ben that he shot it. The others, he decapitated with the machete.
In the morning, five armadillos had been laid out in the Henrys’ barn. Two-Tone and Preacher cleaned them, and Peyton had eaten armadillo for breakfast. She would have choked on it, except that it was tender and delicious and she was starving. Ben Franklin was credited with discovering a new source of food, and was a hero. Peyton was only a girl, fit for sewing, pot washing, and making beds.
Peyton threw herself on the bed and stared at the ceiling. She wanted to be noticed and praised. She wanted to be hero. She recently had been talking to Lib about psychology, a fascinating subject. She had even read one of Lib’s books. “I’m rejected,” she told herself aloud.
If she wanted to be a hero the best way was to catch some fish. She set her mind to the problem, why won’t the fish bite? She had heard the Admiral say that the best fisherman on the river was Preacher Henry and yet she knew that Randy hadn’t talked to Preacher about the no-fish. If anybody could help, Preacher could. She got up, smoothed the bed, and sneaked down the back stairs. This was her day to sweep upstairs. She would finish when she got back.
Peyton found Preacher in the cool of his front porch, rocking. Preacher was getting very old. He didn’t do much of anything any more except rock. Preacher was the oldest person Peyton had ever seen.
Now that he had grown a white beard, he looked like a dark prophet out of the Bible. Peyton said, “Preacher, can you tell me something?”
Preacher was startled. He hadn’t seen her slip up on him, and her voice had broken his dream. He started to rise and then sank back into the chair. “Sure, Peyton,” he said. “What do you want to know?”
“Why don’t the fish bite?”
Preacher chuckled. “They do bite. They bite whenever they eat.”
“Come on, Preacher. Tell me how I can catch some fish.”
“To catch fish, you got to think like a fish. Can you think like a fish, little girl?”
Peyton felt injured, being called a little girl, but she was a child of dignity, and it was with dignity that she answered. “No, I can’t. But I know that you can. You must, because you’re a great fisherman.”
Preacher nodded in agreement. “I was a great fisherman. Now I feel too poorly to fish. Nobody thinks of me any more as a great fisherman. They only think of me as an old man of no use to anyone. You are the first one to ask, ‘Why don’t the fish bite?’ So I’ll tell you.”
Peyton waited.
“If it was very hot, like now, the hottest I ever reme
“I don’t know,” Peyton said. “I know what I do. I take showers, three or four a day. Outside with nothing on.”
Preacher nodded. “The fish, he wants to stay cool too. He don’t hang around the shore there—” his arm swept to indicate the river banks—“he goes out into the middle. The water close to the shore, it’s hot. You put your hand in it, it feels like soup. But out in the middle of the river, way down deep, it’s nice and cool. Down there the fish feels lively and hungry and he eats and when he eats he bites.”
“Bass?”
“Yes. Big bass, ‘way down deep.”
“How would I get them? Nobody’s been able to net any bass bait—no shiners.”
“That’s the trouble,” Preacher said. “The little fish he gets hot too and so he’s out there in the middle deep, being chased by the big fish like always.”
Peyton thought of something. “Would a bass bite a goldfish?”
Preacher looked at her suspiciously. “He sure would! He’d take a goldfish in a second if one was offered! But it against the law to fish with goldfish. But if I did have goldfish, and if it weren’t against the law, and if I did fish out in the deep channel, then I wouldn’t use a bobber. I’d just put a little weight next my hook so that goldfish would sink right down where the big bass lie.”
Peyton said, “Thank you, Preacher,” and skipped away, not wishing to incriminate him further, if it really was true that goldfish were illegal. She went home, found a bucket on the back porch, and then walked across River Road for a talk with Florence Wechek. She and Florence were good friends and often had long talks, but about simple subjects, such as mending.
Florence wasn’t home—she was probably in town helping Alice at the library but the goldfish were.